Lavrov: Missing Chance of JCPOA Revival a Huge Mistake

Russia’s top diplomat said it would be a “huge mistake” to skip the chance of resuming Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. 
“We assume that the agreement to resume it was reached quite a while ago,” Sergey Lavrov told reporters in New York on Tuesday, according to TASS. 
The JCPOA was signed between Iran and the six world powers, France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and the United States, to curb the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief. 
It unraveled in 2018 when the former US president Donald Trump pulled out and reimposed tough sanctions on Tehran, which reacted by scaling down its commitments after losing hope in much-expected compensatory measures by the European parties.
Negotiations to revive the deal began in early 2021 in the Austrian capital Vienna when the new US President Joe Biden expressed readiness to rejoin it.
The process even resulted in a final draft agreement, but final talks have been on hold since August last year over final differences. 
The Russian foreign minister said European countries have lost their enthusiasm in restoring the deal for some reason, and US officials say via different channels on conditions of anonymity that another option should be sought.
At this stage, he added, the resumption of the deal does not depend on Iran, Russia, or China. 
“The ones who destroyed it must now bring it back to life.”
Lavrov said the final draft document was fully in line with this goal. 
Iranian officials have said repeatedly that Tehran is ready to conclude the deal based on the last draft if the other sides show the required will and return to their commitments. 
American officials, however, have been saying in recent months the deal is no longer on top of their agenda, since they have put their main focus on the unrest in Iran following the death of young girl in police custody in September, as well as Tehran’s alleged supply of arms to Moscow for its war on Ukraine. 

Unilateral Advantages 

Lavrov also implicitly censured the western parties for trying to add conditions to the original deal. 
“Attempts to create new requirements that were not mentioned in the initial text … complicate the process and reflect the policy of grasping unilateral advantages through bargaining or blackmail,” he said, without elaborating. 
Trump had exited the JCPOA at the time on the grounds that it was lacking and needed to include a wider range of the Islamic Republic’s activities, including is missiles program and reginal influence. 
The US, on the other hand, accuses Iran of making maximalist demands that have hampered the Vienna negotiations. 
Tehran demands guarantees from Washington that no future US government would violate the deal like the Trump administration did. 
American officials argue that this is not legally possible for a US administration to bind a future president. 
Iran also demands the closure of investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency into traces of uranium that it claims have been found at three old undeclared sites in the country. 
It dismisses the allegation, arguing that any suspicion about its nuclear activities had already been settled in talks that resulted in the JCPOA. 
The issue has become a stumbling block in the Vienna negotiations, with western parties tabling censure motions against Iran at meetings of the IAEA Board of Governors on this ground. 
Iran provided explanations to the agency based on an agreement in March 2022, but the director general described them as uncredible, paving the way for two resolutions against the Islamic Republic by the Board of Governors in June and December last year. 
The latest quarterly meeting of the board went without an anti-Iran statement, possibly due to an agreement between Iran and the agency reached after a visit by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi to Tehran in March. 
During the press conference at the United Nations headquarters, Lavrov was also asked about the recent normalization deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which he described as “a very healthy process”. 
“We, in principle, favor establishing some mechanisms of cooperation, transparency, confidence-building in the [Persian] Gulf region,” he said.