By Parisa Hafezi, Francois Murphy and John Irish
VIENNA, Dec 3 (Reuters) – The seventh round of indirect U.S.-Iranian talks on reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal will end on Friday with a meeting of the remaining parties to the deal, European and Iranian officials said, with the aim of resuming next week.
The gathering of Iran, France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China is in a format known as the Joint Commission that has bookended previous rounds of talks. An Iranian official said the meeting would be held around midday in Vienna.
“The Europeans want to return to their capitals for consultations…We are ready to stay in Vienna for further talks,” another? Iranian official close to the talks, which resumed on Monday after a five-month hiatus, told Reuters.
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On the fourth day of the indirect talks, meant to bring both nations fully back into the deal, the United States and Iran both sounded pessimistic about the chances of reinstating the deal, which former U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018.
Since 2019, Iran has breached many of the pact’s restrictions meant to lengthen the time it would need to generate enough fissile enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. Iran says it is is pursuing enrichment only for civil uses.
Iran has adopted an uncompromising position by demanding the removal of all U.S. and European Union sanctions imposed since 2017, including those unrelated to its nuclear programme, in a verifiable process.
“We are awaiting for the other parties’ response to our proposed drafts,” Iran‘s top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani told reporters on Friday, before heading for a meeting of the remaining parties to the deal, without the United States – whom Iran refuses to meet face-to-face.
Bagheri Kani told Reuters on Monday that the United States and its Western allies also should offer guarantees to Iran that no new sanctions would be imposed on it in the future.
(Reporting by John Irish in Dubai and Parisa Hafezi in Vienna Writing by Francois Murphy and Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
