N-Talks Harder as West 'Pretends' to Take Initiative -Iran Official

A senior Iranian security official said on Monday that progress in talks to salvage Iran's 2015 nuclear deal was becoming "more difficult" as Western powers only "pretended" to come up with initiatives. The indirect talks in Austria between Iran and the United States resumed last week after a 10-day break. Delegates have said the talks have made limited progress since they resumed in November after a five-month hiatus prompted by the election of hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. "The work of Iranian negotiators towards progress is becoming more difficult every moment ... while Western parties 'pretend' to come up with initiatives to avoid their commitments," Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said on Twitter.

Russia’s top diplomat at the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna said world powers had made “significant progress” as their negotiations to revive a landmark 2015 agreement enter their final stage.
In a tweet on Sunday, Mikhail Ulyanov, who’s representing Russia in the talks, said that assessments of the current situation -- in which Iran and the U.S. remain in a tense standoff over how to restore the nuclear deal -- were “positive.” He didn’t give further details and has tended to share a more upbeat outlook on the negotiations, compared with the U.S. and the main European powers involved. Ulyanov, who also met with Iran’s top envoy in the talks and the U.S.’s Special Envoy for Iran on Sunday, said in an earlier tweet that the talks were “at the final stage.”

The agreement imposed restrictions on Iran's nuclear activities that extended the time Tehran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb, if it chose to, to at least a year from around two to three months. Most experts say that time is now shorter than when the deal was struck.

Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

Then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018, re-imposing punishing U.S. sanctions on Iran's economy that slashed its vital oil exports. Iran responded by breaching many of the deal's restrictions and pushing well beyond them, enriching uranium to close to weapons-grade and using advanced centrifuges to do it, which has helped it hone its skills in operating those machines. - Bloomberg, Reuters