An eighth round of talks on reviving the Iran nuclear deal has begun in Vienna, with Iran saying that participants have been largely working from an acceptable draft text and that their team is willing to stay as long as it takes to reach an agreement.
The Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said he wanted the focus of the coming round of talks to be on how Tehran could verify that US sanctions had been lifted. The landmark 2015 deal, from which Donald Trump withdrew the US, lifted sanctions on Iran in return for controls on its civilian nuclear programme.
Amir-Abdollahian said that Iran must reach a point where Iranian oil can be sold easily and without any restrictions, so money for that oil can be transferred in foreign currency to Iran's bank accounts.
He said that the negotiators were working from two joint draft texts. The first covers the nature of all the sanctions that the US must lift and the second is the staging and details of the steps that Iran must reverse to come back into compliance with the deal, such as reducing its nuclear stockpile and ending the use of advanced centrifuges.
In terms of the third paper on the verification of the lifting of sanctions, Iran has spoken in terms of a fixed volume of oil and industrial exports that must be completed before it can take reciprocal action by returning fully to its compliance with its side of the deal.
Iran is concerned that western companies will be hesitant to invest in Iran because of the fear that a future Republican US president could impose sanctions in 2025, putting their investments in jeopardy, just as happened in 2018 when Trump pulled out of the deal.
In February, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that sanctions had to be lifted in practice and not just on paper. A research paper from the Iranian parliament set out the number of barrels of oil to be exported per day, and the required value of transactions taking place in Iranian controlled banks in Europe.
Although the talks will be difficult, Iran seemed intent on injecting some optimism into a process that began in April.
In a major announcement on the day before the eighth round, Iran satomic energy authority pledged that it would not seek to enrich uranium above 60%, a promise that came as a relief to Russian negotiators who were concerned that if Tehran pushed ahead to nuclear weapons-grade 90% enrichment, the European and American delegations would abandon the talks.
Western diplomats stressed that they will not allow the talks to drag on much longer, possibly with early February as the final deadline. They point out that the talks started first and were paused for three months while a new Iranian government reviewed its negotiating position. Israel claims that Iran is procrastinating while its scientists take Iran closer to a nuclear bomb. Western diplomats accept that Iran is closer to breaking time than ever before, but this is not the same as being close to possessing a nuclear weapon.
Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the UK and the EU attended the talks, with a US delegation indirectly involved in a cumbersome procedure that Tehran insists on even though it has delayed progress. In recent weeks, Iran has complained that the European countries, particularly France, have taken a position that is indistinguishable from the US.
The belief that Iran needs western sanctions to be lifted to be able to produce a viable budget is contested within the country, as the leadership team around the new president, Ebrahim Raisi, claim they can avoid costly subsidies on petrol and still produce a viable budget, a claim rejected by many Iranian economists.