Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told gas exporters Tuesday to reject “cruel” sanctions such as those imposed by the United States on Tehran. Raisi also said that the restoration of Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement with influential countries should lift the sanctions.
“Members of this forum should not recognize the sanctions…(because) in today’s world we see that the sanctions will not be effective,” Raisi said at the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries (GEFC) conference in Doha.
Reuters reported last week that a US-Iran deal was taking shape in Vienna after months of indirect talks to revive the nuclear deal the US abandoned in 2018 under President Donald Trump. America, at the time, reimposed extensive sanctions against Iran.
The 2015 deal between Iran and major world powers was aimed at limiting Tehran’s uranium enrichment, complicating its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for lifting international sanctions on Tehran.
“Any sanctions from the deal that deal a blow to the Iranian economy must be lifted,” Iran’s cabinet spokesman, Ali Bahadori Jahromi, told a news conference broadcast live on a state-run website.
Since 2019, Tehran has violated the limits set out in the deal. The country is stockpiling uranium, enriching it to higher purity levels, and operating state-of-the-art centrifuges to accelerate production.
Iran has demanded legal guarantees that the United States will not walk out of the deal again, but Washington has said it is impossible for US President Joe Biden to provide them.
The draft agreement also touched on other issues, including the disbursement of billions of dollars in Iranian funds in South Korean banks, and the release of Western prisoners in Iran. [ab/uh]