Efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal have been pushed back from the brink of collapse after Tehran revised its position after pressure from Russia and China and clear warnings that the EU and the US were about to walk away.
The cautiously optimistic assessment came at the beginning of the seventh round of talks on the future of the nuclear deal in Vienna. It follows a disastrous week of talks last week, in which the US and the EU claimed that Iran had walked back on compromises reached in previous rounds.
Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian ambassador to the talks, said he was able to deal with a number of misunderstandings that caused some tension. The talks represented the last chance for Iran to come back into compliance, according to the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss. Israel has been preparing military strikes in the hope that the talks will fail, which would leave the Iranian nuclear programme unconstrained by any major multilateral agreement.
On the eve of the talks, European diplomats admitted that some factions in Iran wanted to pull out of the nuclear deal. Russia claimed Iran turned up on Thursday with a revised approach and willingness to negotiate on texts agreed during the first round of talks that ended in June, rather than a new set of proposals on sanctions and compliance with the 2015 deal tabled by Iran last week.
The Iranian chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri, sounded more optimistic, saying: What I felt today was different from what I had felt last Friday. I felt that other parties have a more serious will to enter effective and result-oriented talks. Iran proposed last week reflected its views on the 20 June draft. The EU diplomats privately persuading China, and Russia, were persuading Iran that its new demands for a wider US lifting of economic sanctions were unrealistic.
The battle over texts does not mean that the remaining huge points of disagreement will not be resolved soon, but last week the US was questioning whether the Iranian regime in June was interested in a deal or stalling due to its domestic nuclear programme.