Last-ditch talks to persuade Tehran not to exceed nuclear limits within days were on course for failure yesterday, as Iranian officials said that their demands had not been met and Washington rebuffed European calls to ease sanctions to allow negotiations.
A week after Washington called off airstrikes just minutes before impact, diplomats say Iran is on course to within days exceed the threshold of enriched uranium allowed under its nuclear deal with world powers, which Washington quit last year.
Iranian officials met in Vienna with representatives of the nations that are still party to the nuclear deal: Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.
Photo: Reuters
Iran repeated its demand that it be allowed to sell oil.
The talks were a “last chance for the remaining parties ... to gather and see how they can meet their commitments towards Iran,” Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Abbas Mousavi said.
Despite abandoning the deal, Washington has demanded that European countries force Iran to continue complying with it. Iran says it cannot do so unless the Europeans provide it with some way to receive the deal’s promised economic benefits.
“For one year we exercised patience. Now it is the Europeans’ turn to exercise patience,” Mousavi said.
French President Emmanuel Macron this week said that he would ask US President Donald Trump to ease sanctions to allow negotiations to begin, but Trump’s Iran envoy yesterday said that sanctions would remain in place to end Iranian oil exports altogether.
“We will sanction any imports of Iranian crude oil... There are right now no oil waivers in place,” US Special Representative on Iran Brian Hook told reporters in London.
European nations have promised to find ways to allow Iran access to trade in return for continuing to comply, but in practice the effort has failed.
Iran has set a number of deadlines after which it would cease complying with specific terms of the nuclear deal. The first expired on Thursday, the date Tehran said that the quantity of enriched uranium it is holding could exceed the deal’s permissible threshold.
Diplomats in Vienna on Thursday said data suggested that the threshold had not yet been breached, but it could be as soon as today or tomorrow.
Another deadline, when Iran says it could enrich uranium to a purity forbidden under the deal, expires on July 7.
Iran says that if it does exceed thresholds, the steps would be reversible and it still aims to keep the deal in place.
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