The US State Department said on Wednesday it was prepared to return to Vienna for a seventh round of talks with Iran early next month, APA reports citing Sputnik.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement the US believes it is still possible to "quickly reach and implement an understanding on return to mutual full compliance" with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as only a small number of outstanding issues remain to be settled from the last round of talks in June.
The seventh round, which is expected to begin early next month, will be the first since Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August. A conservative, Raisi has criticized his predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, for being too eager to reach a settlement with the Western powers and has ordered a comprehensive review of all aspects of the negotiation process begun in April.
"The new administration is trying to find out what are the shortcomings, what are the characteristics for the previous talks," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh told France 24 earlier this month.
The deal initially reached in 2015 between Iran, the US, UK, France, Germany, European Union, Russia and China, and saw Iran accept strict limits on the purity of uranium-235 it could refine and volume it could store in exchange for the removal of sanctions against the Iranian economy. However, in 2018 then-US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement and accused Iran of secretly violating the deal, reimposing sanctions afterward that crippled Iran's economy and exacerbated the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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