Agreement to revive JCPOA 'within reach': Update

Updates throughout

Talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have made significant progress to date and a breakthrough is "within reach," delegates participating in the negotiations in Vienna said today.

"In these last two weeks, we have been successful in moving a lot of things forward," said Iran's deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi, who has been leading the Iranian delegation at the talks. "We can now say that we have reached a framework or structure of an agreement," Araqchi said.

The latest round of indirect US-Iranian talks has been underway since early May.

The discussions have "really helped to crystallize choices that need to be made by Iran, as well as by the US in order to come back into a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA," the State Department said today, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal.

US special Iran envoy Rob Malley, who is leading the US delegation in Vienna, will return to Washington today but is expected to participate in the next round of talks in Vienna early next week.

"We have made good progress. An agreement is shaping up," the EU's deputy foreign affairs secretary Enrique Mora said following a meeting of the joint commission of the JCPOA. Mora, who has been co-ordinating the joint commission's meetings since talks aimed at bringing the US back to the JCPOA began last month, said he is confident an agreement will be reached. Russia's ambassador to Vienna-based international organisations, Mikhail Ulyanov, struck a similarly positive tone after the meeting, saying that the participants noted "good or significant progress" and that "an agreement is within reach."

The toughest obstacle has been addressing the US sanctions imposed in 2018-2020 that even President Joe Biden's administration views as "poison pills" designed to sabotage a future return to the agreement. Iran insists that all those sanctions need to be removed.

Biden's administration says it will remove only those sanctions that prevent smooth functioning of Iran's economy.

That means that the US would be prepared to remove the "terrorism" labels imposed on Iran's central bank, state-owned NIOC and other oil sector entities. But Washington is loath to remove the same label from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a military force with extensive political and economic interests.

A breakthrough at the talks in Vienna should lead to an easing of US economic sanction against Iran, including restrictions that at one point removed more than 2mn b/d of Iran's crude exports from international markets and pushed Iranian crude output to below 2mn b/d, a level not seen since the start of the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s.

Iran already has increased exports since January, by supplying as much as 800,000 b/d to China in recent months. But that outlet for Iran's exports may be affected by a recent regulatory change in Beijing. The handful of Chinese companies prepared to clear Iranian crude through customs ran out of import quotas in late April and have since been warned against that practice.

The diplomats in Vienna are racing against the clock to reach a deal ahead of the Iranian presidential election, which is due to take place in less than a month. With incumbent Hassan Rohani unable to stand for re-election because he has already completed two four-year terms in office, there is a real concern among the JCPOA stakeholders that his successor — widely expected to be from within Iran's more conservative camps — could prove more challenging to negotiate with.

By Nader Itayim and Haik Gugarats