Iran Says 'West Retreated' In Vienna Nuclear Talks

Nour News which is affiliated with the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ali Shamkhani, made the admission in an editorial Sunday headlined "Why Russia and China's Assistance To Iran Is Misrepresented by Media".

Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian envoy to the talks, said this week that Russia and China convinced Iran to drop some of its "maximalist demands" and that Iran has accepted to negotiate on the basis of the text drawn up during earlier rounds of talks conducted by the Rouhani administration in the spring.

"[The media] present [Ulyanov's] statement, which is true, in a manner that causes a wrong interpretation by its audience," Nour News wrote referring to Ulyanov's revelations. Nour News also admitted that the text being negotiated is the same text previously agreed on -- which Tehran's new negotiating team at first insisted had been dropped – but said the new proposals have been incorporated into it.

"One of the cases that erroneously forms part of these controversies is the claim that the Iranian [negotiation] team is being led by the Eastern bloc, particularly Russia, in the talks", the editorial said while claiming that it is in fact Iran that has managed to encourage Russia to work alongside Iran and "pave the way to a good deal".

Tehran presented two new documents with new demands on November 29 when the Vienna talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reconvened. European sides to the JCPOA – France, Germany, and Britain – rejected the move saying that Iran had gone back on all the progress made during April-June negotiations. US officials claimed that even Russia and China had been disappointed with Iran's action.

The Nour News editorial accused political rivals of fueling controversies over the role of Russia and China to overshadow upcoming visits to Moscow and Beijing by President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian. They want to weaken the Raisi administration's " grand strategy of Looking to the East" to prove that Iran must align itself with the West, the website said.

The policy of relying on Asia or the East, particularly China and Russia, was promulgated by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in 2018, with the catchphrase, “Looking East”. Since then, his hardliner followers have made it one of the centerpieces of a ‘revolutionary economy’.

Meanwhile, in an editorial Sunday entitled "Excessive Demands of the US in Vienna", the official news agency (IRNA) said the United States is hampering the talks despite "recent progress and acceptance of Iran's demands of verifying the lifting of sanctions and assurance that the US will not renege from the nuclear deal again". US officials are reintroducing demands not related to the JCPOA and causing slowness in the talks, the website claimed, but did not mention any specific announcements by Washington.

"Bringing up issues such as the Islamic Republic's missiles and regional activities, particularly during [nuclear] talks, shows that Washington is trying to achieve its non-JCPOA aims through the nuclear talks," IRNA wrote and alleged that Western powers are using the media to exert pressure on Iran.

Simons, who is the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, has based some of his criticism on information from unnamed diplomatic sources, but also on arguments such as candidate Joe Biden’s move in September 2020 to telegraph his eagerness to rejoin the Obama-era 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA.

Simons said in the Staurday op-ed that “there has been a dramatic failure to extract any concessions from Tehran,” not even a freeze on Iran’s uranium enrichment that is bringing the country close to the threshold of stockpiling enough fissile material for a bomb.

He quoted diplomatic sourcesas having described the chief American negotiator Robert Malley as “the most dovish official we’ve ever seen.”

Simons wrote that Malley “has bent over backwards so far that, as one official put it, he now speaks to Tehran from between his legs.”

The Op-ed also described tensions among Western countries involved in the talks and the European often trying to hold back the Biden Administration from making unnecessary concession to Iran.

Simmons concludes. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that 2022 will be Iran’s year.”

With Iranians traditionally suspicious of both Russia and Great Britain, which held influence in the country from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, frequent tweets from

Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s lead negotiator in Vienna, have offered fuel for controversy.

Ulyanov, who has also spoken to journalists starved of news about the talks, said this week that Russia and China had persuaded Iran to moderate some of its demands, including an insistence that talks focus on sanctions rather than the nuclear issue.

Ulyanov also said Iran had agreed to negotiate on a draft under discussion when talks were suspended in June at the tail end of the government of President Hassan Rouhani. Officials in the new administration of President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) have instead emphasized written proposals submitted by Iran at the beginning of December.

In comments to the media on December 30, Ulyanov suggested that the first half of February was a realistic target for achieving agreement on how to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This remark was seized on by a commentary by the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) Saturday as consistent with warnings from both the United States and the three European JCPOA signatories – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – that it would soon be too late to revive the 2015 agreement. "These remarks were made by the Russian envoy despite the Iranian side's insistence that there would be no deadline,” INLA noted.

Moscow’s consistent position sincethe US left the JCPOA in 2018 and Iran began in 2019 to expand its nuclear program beyond JCPOA limits is that both should respect their commitments under the agreement.

Photos tweeted by Ulyanov of his meetings with Rob Malley, the United States official leading the US delegation in Vienna, and his December 29 reference to“close consultations and coordination”with Malleyhave spurred more controversy. Many on social media took the photo as a sign that Russia is negotiating on Iran’s behalf face to face with the United States, while Tehran refuses to have direct talks with Washington. “Isn’t this a sign of how weak the regime is?”, a post said.

Farmer in remote village

In its commentary, ILNA noted that talks between Malley and Ulyanov had “worried” Iranians who had “become sensitive in recent days about Russian moves … that Moscow is playing the Iran card against Washington.” Such Iranians, INLA continued, saw these meeting as “their country's dignity being peddled at the negotiation table.”

In an editorial Saturday headlined "Honesty, Pillar of Good Governance,” Masih Mohajeri, editor of the conservative Jomhouri Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper, wrote that Iranians “should not hear the news, decisions, and plans of their country from foreigners.” While Jomhouri Eslami has a small circulation, many Iranian news websites on Saturday reprinted the editorial in full.

Mohajeri recounted a conversation with a "farmer in a remote village" who had asked him why Iran’s leaders were not admitting that they had decided to agree to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement soon. "His expectation from the authorities is to be honest with the people," Mohajeri wrote.

Another commentary in Jomhouri Eslami Saturday, written by Hossein Alaei, former commander of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) navy, offered advice over the 20-year Iran-Russia pact due to be signed during Raisi's upcoming visit to Moscow."We should be vigilant so that new pacts increase the two countries' trade and be mutually beneficial rather than solving Russia's long-term problems," Alaei wrote.

In an interview with Channel 12 on Friday, Lapid answering a question about Israel’s military ability to attack and destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, said, “Israel has capabilities, some of which the world, and even some experts in the field, cannot even imagine. And Israel will protect itself against the Iranian threat.”

As world powers try to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), abandoned by former US president Donald Trump, Israel is concerned of a new agreement that would not permanently restrict Iran’s nuclear program, while lifting sanctions giving Tehran a financial lifeline.

The foreign minister also repeated an earlier position that if Israel feels threatened by Iran’s nuclear advances, it could attack without necessarily informing the Biden administration, which is pursuing a new accord with Iran.

“Israel will do whatever it needs to do to protect its security. And we don’t need anybody’s permission for that. That’s been the case since the first day we established this state,” he said. He also added that “Israel is not against a good deal, it is only against the wrong deal.”

Speaking to media, including Iran International’s reporter in Vienna after Thursday's talks, Mikhail Ulyanov said Russia was willing to remove any uranium enriched by Iran since 2019 that surpasses the limits of the 2015 agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). He added that no decision had yet been taken.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in November that Iran had stockpiled 2,490kg of enriched uranium – way above the 300kg cap allowed under the JCPOA. This included 114kg of uranium enriched to 20 percent, and 18kg to 60 percent, neither of which is permitted under the 2015 agreement, which limited domestic enrichment to 3.67 percent.

Ulyanov added that it remained possible that Russia would implement a joint project with Iran to help produce stable isotopes − which have a broad variety of applications including agricultural and medical − at Iran's Fordow enrichment facility.

Such work requires uranium enriched to at least 20 percent. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran was required to import such ‘highly enriched uranium’ where needed for medical and other civil purposes, including the Tehran Research Reactor, but this became problematic when the United States left the JCPOA and imposed ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions.

Moscow ceased its co-operation with Iran over producing isotopes at the Fordow facility in 2019 when the US revoked a waiver ‘allowing’ Moscow to engage in the project without the threat of punitive American action. After Russia's withdrawal, Behrouz Kamalvandi, deputy chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), said Iran was able to produce 11 different types of isotopes without Russia's help.

Agreement by mid-February?

Ulyanov described the latest round of talks this week in positive terms and said an agreement on restoring the JCPOA was realistic by the first half of February although several important political and technical issues remained. "We talk about a multipage draft, you can't just identify just one or two problematic areas," he noted.

Asked about "verification of the lifting of sanctions,” Ulyanov said it was up to Iran to specify exactly what it wanted, and that other parties to the deal were looking for ways to provide Iran with some guarantee the US would not again renege on commitments: "I believe nobody here wants a repetition of the previous exercise in a couple of years."

Before his return to Tehran, as talks broke for three days Thursday, Iran’s lead negotiator Ali Bagheri-Kani said the latest round had focused on lifting sanctions, with “relatively good progress” made, and on verification. A western diplomat involved in the talks told Iran International Wednesday that indirect exchanges between the Iranian and US delegation had picked up pace.