EU Will Try to Ensure Resumption of Vienna Talks

The EU’s top negotiator will meet his counterpart from Tehran this week in Brussels for talks on restarting negotiations over Iran’s nuclear deal, a spokesman for the bloc said.
The EU and world powers are scrambling to try to get negotiations in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 accord back on track after the election of President Ebrahim Raeisi in Tehran.
Iran’s chief negotiator on the deal, Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Baqeri, also wrote on Twitter that he would be in Brussels on Wednesday “to continue our talks on result-oriented negotiations.”
“Iran is determined to engage in negotiations that would remove unlawful and cruel sanctions in a full & effective manner, secure normalization of trade & economic relations w/ Iran, and provide credible guarantee for no further reneging,” Baqeri said. 
EU spokesman Peter Stano said the meeting would involve the bloc’s lead negotiator Enrique Mora, who visited Tehran earlier this month to push Iran to restart full negotiations, Arab News reported.
Stano said the EU’s diplomatic service was “sparing no efforts to resume talks of all parties in Vienna.”
The agreement between Iran and world powers to find a long-term solution to the now two-decade-old standoff over its nuclear program has been moribund since former US president Donald Trump walked out of the deal in May 2018.
His successor Joe Biden has said he is ready to re-enter the agreement, so long as Iran meets key preconditions including full compliance with the deal whose terms it has gradually abandoned by ramping up nuclear activities since the US left the pact. Tehran says it is the US that must take the first move and remove sanctions. 
But the Vienna-based talks through intermediaries made little headway, before being interrupted by the election of Raeisi as Iran’s president and were suspended for the last four months.
The EU acts as coordinator for the deal that also involves Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.
Meanwhile, the US said on Monday that it supported the EU’s engagement with Iran as coordinator of the nuclear deal, but stressed that the “ultimate destination” to try to revive the accord was to resume talks in Vienna.
“The EU is the JCPOA coordinator. And we are very supportive of the EU’s engagement with Iran in that capacity,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters, referring to the deal by its formal name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “That said ... the ultimate destination needs to be Vienna,” Price added.