US President Joseph Biden did not explicitly state that the US would not ease sanctions until Iran first returns to comply with the terms of the JCPOA, but any further discussions are possible only after that. This statement was made by the press secretary of the White House Jen Psaki on Monday, February 8.
Earlier on the air, the CBS television channel Biden replied in the affirmative that the United States does not intend to be the first to lift sanctions on Iran in order to return the country to the negotiating table on a nuclear deal. When the presenter clarified whether Tehran should first stop enriching uranium, the president nodded in the affirmative, writes CNN.
Psaki pointed out that Biden himself never said this verbatim. Interviewer Nora O’Donnell spoke about the sanctions. Separately, a White House spokeswoman stressed that Biden did not answer this question, but only nodded. According to Psaki, if the White House was going to announce a new approach to Iran, the president would “do more than a nod of his head.”
The spokeswoman also added that Biden’s position on the Iranian issue remains the same. If Iran returns to full compliance with its obligations under the JCPOA, Washington will do the same, and then use this as a platform to build a broader and more substantive agreement that will also touch on other areas of “concern.”
The spiritual leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, after an interview with Biden in question, in turn, said that Tehran would not make concessions to Washington and would not be the first to return to the JCPOA until the US lifted the sanctions imposed on Iran.
Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Vasily Nebenzya called the conditions in the statements of Iran and the United States on Washington’s return to the nuclear deal mutually exclusive.
On February 4, Moscow expressed its readiness to cooperate with the new US administration on the rescue of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian Nuclear Program (JCPOA).
According to the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, Iran’s actions to renounce its obligations under the treaty do not go beyond the framework of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
An agreement between Iran and a group of states – the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France and Germany – was signed in 2015 in order to overcome the crisis over Tehran’s nuclear developments. Sanctions were lifted from Iran in exchange for refusing to develop its nuclear program.
In 2018, Washington withdrew from the JCPOA, after which it launched a campaign to exert economic pressure on Iran by renewing sanctions.
In response, Iran announced in 2019 a phased reduction of its obligations under the agreement, abandoning restrictions on nuclear research. In November 2020, the States added four people and six organizations to the Tehran sanctions lists, and then expanded the sanctions list several times.