The European powers and the coordinator of the talks said that the participants in the indirect negotiations between Iran and the United States on the Iranian nuclear file have only weeks left to reach an agreement, after postponing the negotiations for at least 10 days.

On Friday evening, the major powers announced the conclusion of the seventh round of negotiations on the Iranian nuclear file without reaching an agreement, and confirmed that they would hold a new round before the end of the year.


only weeks

The European coordinator of the Vienna negotiations, Enrique Mora, said that the eighth round would resume soon, and that complicated tasks awaited it. Britain, Germany and France also said that the nuclear agreement could lose its viability within weeks.

"We don't have months, but only weeks, to reach an agreement," Mora told a news conference after the final formal meeting of the seventh round of talks.

He added that he hoped to resume talks this year, and some officials have tentatively referred to December 27.


American upset

For his part, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in Washington that the negotiations "are not going well."

In an online seminar for the American Council on Foreign Relations, he stressed that negotiations "has turned out over the course of the year to be more difficult than we had hoped," at a time when Iran is moving forward "at a rapid pace" with its nuclear program.

He added that Washington conveyed to Iran, through European negotiators, directly its "discomfort" about the "progress" made by Tehran in its nuclear program, but he refused to add details about the content of these messages.

In the same context, a senior official in the administration of US President Joe Biden told reporters on Friday that the United States believes that the time needed for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon is now "really short" and alarmingly.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not specify this exact period, but stressed that it was "a really short time. Unacceptably short."

However, a senior US State Department official said that the Vienna talks could resume before the end of the year, and that his country was ready to return to them.

The US official added, "We are committed to returning to the nuclear agreement, provided that Iran does the same," noting that the last round of Vienna talks was "better than we expected and less than it should be."


partial progress

In turn, Iran's chief negotiator Ali Bagheri said that the Western parties accepted some points regarding lifting sanctions, which he considered partial progress.

"If the other side accepts Iran's rational views, the next round of talks could be the last," Bagheri told reporters.

In 2018, the United States withdrew from the international nuclear agreement concluded in Vienna in 2015 aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Iran.

Then Washington reimposed sanctions on Tehran that severely affect the Iranian economy.

About a year after the US withdrawal from the agreement, Iran has gradually retreated from implementing most of the basic commitments it stipulates.

Meanwhile, Tehran and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency announced Wednesday that they had reached an agreement on replacing the cameras at the Tissa nuclear complex in Karaj, west of Tehran, after it was damaged in an attack in June that Iran blamed on Israel.