Russia Sees Iran Deal Within a Week as Talks Slip into March

Russia’s top diplomat at the Iran nuclear talks said there was a “very high probability” that Tehran and Washington will end their impasse over how to restore the 2015 atomic accord before the end of next week.  An agreement to revive the deal, which the U.S. abandoned in 2018, would “almost for sure” be settled “next week or before the end of the next week,” Mikhail Ulyanov said on the sidelines of the talks in Vienna on Sunday, warning that last-minute “surprise or negative developments” could still scuttle the negotiations.  

Also, Iran said on Sunday it will not accept any deadline set by the West to revive its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and wants "politically motivated" claims by U.N. watchdog IAEA about Tehran’s nuclear work to be dropped, Iranian state TV reported. "We have answered the agency's (IAEA) questions or politically motivated claims ... that we think were baseless. These dossiers should be closed," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said, according to state TV's website.

Among sticking points in the indirect talks between Iran and the United States to revive the 2015 nuclear deal appear to be questions about uranium traces found by the IAEA at old but undeclared sites in Iran. "Iran accepts no deadlines," Khatibzadeh said, in apparent reaction to media reports that the United States had set a deadline for the nuclear talks in the Austrian capital Vienna. Iran has made clear it wants an end to the oil and banking sanctions that are hurting its economy, while insisting also on the lifting of human rights and terrorism-related curbs. - Bloomberg, Reuters