TEHRAN — A leading European Union diplomat held talks in Tehran on Sunday, Iran’s state-run media reported, amid hopes that an agreement to restore Iran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers could be completed.
The meetings between the EU’s envoy, Enrique Mora, and top Iranian officials come at a sensitive moment for talks to revive the deal, as the glimmers of a resolution to some of the thorniest issues in the negotiations have emerged.
The report on the talks in Tehran gave scant detail, saying only that the diplomats discussed the latest on the nuclear agreement, with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani repeating that Iran believed a deal was within reach if America was “realistic” in its demands.
Former President Donald Trump abandoned the nuclear deal in 2018 and re-imposed crushing sanctions. Iran gradually breached the agreement with a massive expansion of its nuclear work.
Nuclear talks broke off earlier this month as last-minute wrangles in Vienna coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and financial sanctions imposed by the West on Moscow.
But officials have since made encouraging noises. Russia appeared to back down from its earlier demand that its trade with Iran be exempted from Western sanctions.
And for the first time, Iran’s top diplomat on Saturday publicly signaled flexibility over Tehran’s demand that Washington stop designating the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, its powerful paramilitary force, as a foreign terrorist organization.
The prospect of the designation’s removal had alarmed America’s Mideast allies, such as Israel, which fiercely opposed the original nuclear deal and argued that easing sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard would embolden Iranian-backed militant groups from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen.
In a visible sign that shared regional anxiety over a renewed nuclear deal was growing, the Israeli government hastily arranged an unprecedented summit of top diplomats from Arab countries that have normalized ties with Israel along with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“We are both committed, both determined that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon,” Blinken said alongside Israel’s foreign minister, seeking to reassure his jittery counterparts before the gathering.
