(Berlin) Negotiations to save the international Iranian nuclear agreement are making “modest progress”, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday, but they are still too slow given the acceleration of Tehran’s nuclear activities. , according to his French counterpart.
Posted at 10:49 a.m.
“My personal assessment, having spoken to all of our colleagues, is that a return to mutual compliance remains possible,” Blinken said in Berlin after talks with his European counterparts.
“We have seen, I would say, modest progress over the past two weeks in the talks” in Vienna, he added.
For his part, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned him that the negotiation “cannot continue at such a slow pace”.
“Partial, timid and slow”
Judging the progress in the talks “partial, timid and slow”, the minister judged that there was “an urgent need to change the pace, otherwise it will inevitably be the end of the JCPOA (the Vienna Nuclear Agreement). Iranian),” he told a press conference in Berlin.
The month of “February will be absolutely decisive. We don’t have much time left,” a French diplomatic source told AFP.
Earlier, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also called for “urgent progress” in the tough negotiations which resumed in November.
“We need very, very urgent progress,” said the head of diplomacy as a timid revival of optimism has accompanied the talks in Vienna for several weeks, after a difficult start.
“Decisive phase”
“The negotiations in Vienna are not entering a decisive phase, but the decisive phase”, she added, stressing that “we are literally running out of time”.
Alongside the talks, Iran unfortunately continues to spin the spiral of nuclear escalation.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock
On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden also showed himself to be relatively optimistic about the possibility of saving the nuclear agreement with Iran, assuring that the time has “not yet come to abandon” the discussions.
He assured that Washington was “in unison” with the other signatory countries (Russia, France, China, United Kingdom and Germany) of the agreement concluded in 2015 with Iran, and from which Donald Trump had withdrawn the States States three years later.
This agreement offered Tehran the lifting of part of the international sanctions in exchange for a drastic reduction in its ambitions in the nuclear sector, placed under the strict control of the UN.
But after the unilateral American withdrawal, Tehran gradually abandoned its commitments. The United States in turn imposed sanctions.
Talks were relaunched in November in Vienna to bring Washington back to this pact and bring Tehran back to respecting its commitments.