Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Monday that he expects Tehran will be ready to return to indirect negotiations with the US to revive the nuclear deal by early November.
Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said he doesn’t believe that the new Iranian government under President Ebrahim Raisi will take as long as the Biden administration did to come to the table.
“I don’t think it will take us the same amount of time as it took the Biden administration to come,” he said, according to AFP. “The government of Ebrahim Raisi has been in power for less than 55 days… I don’t think that the [return to talks] will take as much as 90 days.”
The JCPOA talks have been stalled since June 20th, around the time Raisi was elected. Raisi came into office in August and has been signaling that the new government wants to resume the negotiations but has not given a specific timeline.
On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on the US to make a goodwill gesture to restart the talks by unfreezing $10 billion in Iranian assets. On Monday, Germany said it would reject any Iranian calls for the US to unfreeze Iranian assets.
The West blames Iran for the stalled talks, but it was the Biden administration’s refusal to lift all Trump-era sanctions that delayed the process in the first place. The negotiations began in April and were dragged out as the two sides negotiated limited sanctions relief, a significant concession for Iran. The last round concluded with the two countries far apart on key issues.
“If here new conditions are being set by Iran for talks to be resumed, then we reject that,” a German foreign ministry spokesman said after Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian’s demand for assets worth 10 billion dollars to be released as a goodwill gesture.
“New conditions”? The guy is talking about Iran asking the US to unfreeze 10 billion of THEIR fu*king assets. Wasn’t that part of the original deal?
All US sanctions and asset freeze are illegal under international laws…!