Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif returned to the nuclear talks in Vienna where negotiators are struggling to overcome still significant differences and preparing to work through yesterday’s self-imposed deadline for a deal.
Zarif rejoined the talks after a day of consultations in Tehran and was meeting first with US Secretary of State John Kerry.
“I feel the negotiations have reached a very sensitive stage, and at this stage, with political will, determination and lots of work, progress is possible,” Zarif told reporters on arriving in Vienna with Iranian Atomic Energy Organization head Ali Akbar Salehi, who missed earlier sessions due to illness.
Iran’s official news agency said Salehi’s participation indicated Iran’s serious desire to accelerate the talks and achieve a comprehensive deal. Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov was also expected to join the discussions.
Zarif said Iran would accept only an agreement that is “fair, balanced and also based on national pride and the rights of the Iranian people.”
On Monday, US officials suggested that significant backtracking by Tehran’s negotiators may need several more days of discussions to resolve.
Monday had originally been envisioned as the penultimate day of a 20-month process to assure the world that Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons and to provide the Iranian people a path of out of years of international isolation.
However, over the weekend, officials said they were nowhere near a final accord, and Zarif flew back to his capital for further consultations.
Several signs pointed toward Iranian intransigence and perhaps even backsliding on a framework it reached with world powers three months ago. At a briefing for about three-dozen reporters — mainly from the US — a senior US official repeated several times that the final package must be based on the April parameters — “period.”
The official declined to elaborate because of the sensitivity of the diplomacy; reporters were updated on the condition that no individuals be quoted by name.
At the UN, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius told reporters that no new target date has been set for concluding the nuclear talks, which would set a decade of restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of uranium and other activity in exchange for tens of billions of dollars in relief from international economic sanctions.
Fabius, who was in Vienna over the weekend, repeated his country’s red lines for an agreement: stricter limits on Iranian research and development, capacity for UN nuclear monitors to verify the deal and the ability of world powers to snap sanctions back into place quickly if Iran cheats.
In addition to France, Russia and the US, other negotiating countries are Britain, China and Germany.
France’s conditions are essentially the same as Washington’s, whose diplomats have conducted the bulk of the negotiations with Iran since a series of secret talks between the countries two years ago and then the election of moderate-leaning Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
The US official said many of the trickiest issues involved in the negotiation remained unresolved. These have been described by others as the level of inspections Iran will grant International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, how fast the US and its partners would lift sanctions on Iran and the exact restrictions on Iranian research of advance nuclear technology.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS