Iran and world powers on Tuesday failed to narrow differences over the Iranian nuclear drive after bruising talks in Moscow held amid threats of a crippling oil embargo and even military action against Tehran.
However, the Iranian negotiating team and the world powers led by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton succeeded in keeping talks alive by agreeing a process for future meetings.
“It remains clear that there are significant gaps between the substance of the two positions,” Ashton told reporters in a late night news conference after nine hours of talks on the second and final day.
There had been “tough and frank” exchanges with the delegation led by chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, said Ashton, who represented the world powers known as “P5+1” — permanent UN Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia and the US, plus Germany.
Ashton said the world powers reaffirmed their demands for Iran to stop enriching uranium to 20 percent purity, ship out its existing stock of such material and shut down its heavily fortified Fordo enrichment facility.
“We expect Iran to decide whether it is willing to make diplomacy work, to focus on reaching agreement on concrete confidence-building steps and to address the concerns of the international community,” she said.
Jalili called the talks “more serious and more realistic” than the rounds held earlier this year in Istanbul and last month in Baghdad.
He also floated the possibility that the supply of nuclear fuel from abroad could form part of a deal in the future.
However, in an indication that Iran still wanted to enrich uranium to 20 percent, he said: “We insisted on the fact that the enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes to all levels is the right of the Islamic Republic.”
Jalili also warned that the wide scale oil export sanctions that the EU and the US are both set to impose against Iran risked derailing the negotiating process.
“If a path against this approach is started and certain actions disturb this approach, it will definitely affect the result of these talks,” he said.
“Any wrong move and any move not on this approach will definitely not be constructive, and will have an appropriate response,” he added.
However, a senior US administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity after the talks, said that there would be no softening of the sanctions against Tehran.
“I don’t think the differences have narrowed,” the official said.
“I think what is correct to interpret is that Iran has a choice to make. They have provided a lot of information — as have we — and they need to reflect on the choice they make,” he added.
France said after the talks that sanctions on Iran will be tightened unless Tehran negotiates seriously.
“Pressure should now increase on Iran with the EU fully applying from July 1 the oil embargo decided on in January,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in a statement released in Paris. “The sanctions will continue to be tightened as long as Iran refuses to negotiate seriously.”
The final day negotiations were also marked by bilateral talks involving Iran and Russia, which apparently stepped in during the afternoon to ensure the negotiating process stayed on track.
Ashton said an expert-level meeting would take place on July 3 in Istanbul, followed by another meeting between the deputies of herself and Jalili.
A higher-level meeting involving herself and Jalili would follow at an unspecified later date and location, she added.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited