Good Deal in Vienna Impossible without Sanctions Removal: Shamkhani
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council ruled out the possibility of any agreement in the Vienna talks on the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal with the anti-Iran sanctions remaining in place.
In a post on his Twitter account on Monday, Ali Shamkhani said, “The agenda for the Iranian negotiators to continue the eighth round of Vienna Talks has been carefully defined.”
“An agreement in which the sanctions that form the maximum pressure are not lifted will condition the country's economy and cannot be the basis of a Good Deal,” he added.
In comments at a presser in the morning, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said Iran will by no means compromise its principles on the necessity for the termination of sanctions and for benefiting from the 2015 nuclear deal in the course of Vienna negotiations.
Describing the removal of sanctions and Iran’s right to enjoy the advantages of the JCPOA as Tehran’s red line in the talks, the spokesman said Washington is expected to have made the requisite decisions.
Iran and the remaining participants to the JCPOA have been holding talks in Vienna since April last year with the aim of reviving the deal by bringing the US into full compliance.
The US left the JCPOA in May 2018 under former president Donald Trump. The Vienna talks began on a promise by Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, to rejoin the deal and repeal the so-called maximum pressure campaign against Iran. Biden, however, has so far failed to undo Trump’s own undoing of Barack Obama’s Iran policy, which led to the JCPOA in June 2015.
The eighth round of the Vienna talks began on December 27 with a focus on the removal of all sanctions that the United States had imposed on Iran after its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA. The US is not allowed to directly attend the talks due to its pullout in 2018 from the deal with Iran.