Palais Coburg in Vienna where negotiations to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are being held. Photo: Reuters/Leonhard Foeger

An Iranian nuclear negotiator has accused the US and its allies of exploiting the Russian invasion of Ukraine to try and railroad the Tehran regime into a “bad deal” on its nuclear program.

Mohammad Marandi — an adviser to the Iranian negotiating team currently in Vienna seeking a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal — said on Tuesday that American and European negotiators were “stonewalling” and raising issues that he claimed were “not even relevant to the nuclear negotiations.”

He said that European negotiators were especially focused on the conflict in Ukraine without specifying how this had impacted their negotiating stance, as the talks reached what some regime figures have depicted as a “make or break” point.

Marandi stressed that Iran would not “be pushed into a bad deal or an incomplete deal or a problematic deal simply because the Europeans say they have problems elsewhere and that they need to conclude the negotiations fast. To Iranians, that’s unacceptable.”

Continued Marandi: “They are talking about Ukraine and Russia which has nothing to do with the problem. So it just shows that the Europeans and the Americans are not honest, nor are they consistent in their argumentation.”

Talks on some sort of restoration of the 2015 deal have been ongoing in Vienna over the last ten months. Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA), the deal was agreed between Iran, the US and five world powers, including Russia, before former President Donald Trump withdrew from its provisions in 2018.

Marandi said that a few outstanding issues remained on the table. According to the Iranian foreign ministry, the main challenges are the extent to which sanctions would be rolled back, providing guarantees that the US would not quit the pact again, and resolving questions over uranium traces found at several old but undeclared sites in Iran.

“We have been able to push forward and to resolve most of the issues, but there are a few remaining issues that are key in order for a deal to be agreed upon,” Marandi told the regime’s official broadcaster, Press TV. He made clear that Iran was demanding “an airtight deal” without loopholes that the Americans and the Europeans would exploit “as they’ve done so many times before.”

Meanwhile, the Russian diplomat attending the talks stated on Tuesday that they would be completed “very soon.”

“Tremendous progress has been made since April 2021, when the talks started. But there is a rule: nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov said. He added that “intensive work is ahead of us to wrap up the negotiations on restoration of the JCPOA.”