EU envoy in Tehran amid hopes to restore nuclear agreement
Tehran, March 27
A leading European Union diplomat held talks in Tehran on Sunday, Iran’s state-run media reported, amid hopes that an agreement to restore Iran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers could be completed.
The meetings between the EU’s envoy, Enrique Mora, and Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani come at a time as the glimmers of a resolution to some of the thorniest issues in the negotiations have emerged.
Blinken tries to pacify ally Israel
- US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday tried to soothe the fears of Israel and its Gulf Arab allies ahead of nuclear deal with Iran
- Israel and its neighbours are fiercely opposed to the deal, which they believe will embolden and enrich Iran
- The Biden administration has been working to renew the 2015 nuclear deal
West needs courage: Zelenskyy
- Zelenskyy accused the West of lacking courage as his country fights Russia’s invasion
- He lashed out at the West’s “ping-pong about who and how should hand over jets and other defensive weapons to us”
‘US not trying to topple putin’
- Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the US is not trying to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite its harsh condemnations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
- Blinken spoke a day after President Joe Biden said of Putin during a speech in Warsaw: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”
The report on the talks in Tehran gave scant detail, saying only that the diplomats discussed the latest on the nuclear agreement, with Kani repeating that Iran believed a deal was within reach if US was “realistic” in its demands.
Former President Donald Trump abandoned the nuclear deal in 2018 and re-imposed crushing sanctions.
Iran gradually breached the agreement with a massive expansion of its nuclear work. Nuclear talks broke off earlier this month as last-minute wrangles in Vienna coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and financial sanctions imposed by the West on Moscow.
But officials have since made encouraging noises. Russia appeared to back down from its earlier demand that its trade with Iran be exempted from Western sanctions.
And for the first time, Iran’s top diplomat on Saturday publicly signalled flexibility over Tehran’s demand that Washington stop designating the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organisation. — AP
