For six months, Vienna’s Hotel Palais Coburg has played host to diplomats from Iran, the UK, France, China, Germany and Russia locked in nuclear negotiations. Their aim is to piece back together the Iran deal scuppered by the Trump administration when it withdrew four years ago.
Earlier this week there were signs that the end of the talks was in sight. Insiders said a new deal could emerge before Sunday.
But the Ukraine crisis may hamper progress: key negotiating countries are now on opposite sides and Iran has offered tacit support to Russia. On Twitter, Iran’s foreign minister parroted the Kremlin’s line that the Ukraine crisis is “rooted in Nato’s provocations”.
Ireland’s defence minister, Simon Coveney, said he could see how the Russian invasion “could all of a sudden make what has been genuine progress in recent weeks in Vienna become a much more difficult negotiation to conclude”.
Others involved say the Russian and Western negotiators have so far managed to keep the focus on the talks.
What would a deal look like?
The two sides are negotiating over a document with three likely sections: sanctions (which ones will be lifted); sequencing (how the deal will be structured and what each side will do and when); and assurances (pledges that the deal will actually last).
Sticking points:
- Uranium: Iran has a number of advanced centrifuges and started enriching uranium to 60 per cent in 2021, not far below the 90 per cent enrichment required for a bomb. Under a deal, Iran would agree to decommission its advanced centrifuges, to downgrade its supplies of high-enriched uranium and to send its low-enriched uranium to Russia.
- Sanctions: Iran wants sanctions relief in exchange for dismantling its nuclear programme. It would like Washington to lift all US sanctions brought in since 2018, but the deal only relates to nuclear-related sanctions. Those attached to Iran’s ballistic missile programme, terror links and human rights abuses stayed in place after the original deal was signed in 2015.
- Money: Iran has around $30 billion stuck in foreign bank accounts including roughly $7 billion in South Korea. Under a deal those funds could be unfrozen fairly quickly.
- Oil: OPEC+ said that if an agreement is struck it will welcome Iran back into its supply quota system as US sanctions lift and Iran ratchets up production.
- Hostages: Officially, negotiations over foreign and dual nationals held prisoner in Iran are not part of the nuclear deal. But Robert Malley, the chief US negotiator, has made clear that for a deal to work Iran must return US citizens held there. In January he told Reuters: “It is very hard for us to imagine getting back into the nuclear deal while four innocent Americans are being held hostage by Iran.” Negotiations for the release of UK prisoners Anousheh Ashouri and Nazanin Zagahri Ratcliffe are also happening in parallel to the Vienna talks. Their fate is unofficially tied to a £400 million tank debt owed by the UK to Tehran, again not part of the Vienna negotiations, but UK foreign secretary Liz Truss told Iran last week that she hoped the debt could be repaid soon. Lifting sanctions on Iran would make it easier for the UK to hand over the money.
What’s left?
Negotiators have been tight-lipped about what they are still wrangling over but the best guess is assurances, according to Sanam Vakil of Chatham House. “That’s the biggest ticket and the hardest one to resolve.”
Going into the negotiations the Iranians wanted a guarantee the deal wouldn’t be torn up by a new US administration as early as 2025. They have conceded that the United States can’t be bound by what a future president might do, but Vakil says assurances remain important to Tehran. The negotiators are probably trying to “provide the Iranian government with some sort of justification that this deal will be a bit more sustainable”.
Will it happen?
It could be now or never. “If we don’t succeed very quickly in this, the negotiations threaten to fail,” German chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Time is certainly of the essence. If delayed much longer, a nuclear deal may be moot. The aim of a deal is to keep Iran comfortably far off being able to build a bomb, but its capabilities have advanced so much in recent years that it could amass enough enriched uranium for a bomb in a matter of weeks and build one in a couple of years.
Interfax says Putin and Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi talked about Ukraine and the nuclear deal over the phone yesterday, agreeing that getting the agreement over the line would “help maintain regional stability and security.” But the final days of negotiation are usually the toughest. The Ukraine invasion won’t help.