Senior Iranian diplomats are due to meet with their counterparts from the E3 group of Germany, France and the UK on Tuesday in Geneva in a last-ditch effort to avoid triggering a process to reinstate international sanctions on Iran.
Iranian deputy foreign ministers Kazem Gharibabadi and Majid Takht Ravanchi will meet with representatives of the E3 and the EU, Iranian state media reported on Monday.
The meeting would be the third such gathering this year, and the second since the 12-day conflict between Iran and Israel in June, which brought months of active nuclear diplomacy between Tehran and the US to an abrupt halt.
It also comes just days after Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, held a teleconference with his E3 counterparts, and the EU high representative for foreign affairs, Kaja Kallas, on 22 August.
Tuesday's meeting will hope to succeed where previous meetings have failed ꟷ to devise and agree on concrete proposals to address the west's ongoing concerns over Iran's nuclear activities, particularly around the threat of Iran weaponizing its enriched uranium.
But with the E3 saying last month that it would reimpose snapback sanctions on Tehran by as early as the end of August if Iran did not properly address some of the more pressing concerns, time is of the essence.
The snapback mechanism was built into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, which saw a lifting of some nuclear sanctions on Iran, in exchange for limits on its nuclear activities. That mechanism would allow the signatories to the deal to respond to Iranian violations by reimposing some of the sanctions.
If the sanctions are not reinstated they would expire by 18 October. But with the snapback process taking 30 days, the E3 have set the end of August as their deadline to trigger the mechanism.
"Such an extension would be granted to provide additional time for negotiations, with the aim of concluding a new agreement," they said.
The group separately presented an offer to the Iranians to push back the end-August deadline to reinstate those sanctions if it agreed to restart nuclear negotiations with the US ─ something Iran has shown little interest in doing in the immediate term.
But Iran's foreign ministry rejected that offer last week, saying Tehran had "no plans" to agree to any such extension, ostensibly because it felt the E3 did not have the right to trigger the snapback mechanism in the first place.
China and Russia, the two other parties to the JCPOA with the right to trigger the snapback sanctions, have shown no intent to do so, and have largely sided with Iran on the matter.
The E3 "definitely" do not have the "legal or procedural" rights to trigger snapback sanctions against Iran, said Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia's envoy to Vienna-based organizations, on 22 August.
Ulyanov had been Russia's top representative in previous rounds of nuclear negotiations with Iran.
