By Vestnik Kavkaza
The next round of negotiations between Iran and the “5+1” on a settlement of the Iranian nuclear problem will take place on November 20. The head of European diplomacy Catherine Ashton stated that progress was achieved at the talks with Iran, which ended on Sunday, but disputes still remain. The head of Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, explained that the parties managed to withdraw from “sanctions leverage”.
The talks were notable by the fact that they suddenly changed their format in the middle of the process. Initially the deputy foreign ministers, Catherine Ashton, and the Iranian delegation headed by the Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif gathered in Geneva, but later the Western party decided to improve its forces by heads of foreign departments of the U.S., France, Germany, and the UK. A senior scientist of the Oriental Studies Institute of the RAS, Vladimir Sazhin, told Vestnik Kavkaza that the emergency arrival of John Kerry, Laurent Fabius, Gido Westerwelle and William Hague was connected with the necessity to make the level of the negotiators similar: “The new Iranian negotiating team which, was composed after the presidential elections in Iran, is headed now by the Foreign Minister of Iran, even though previously the talks were provided at the level of deputy ministers,” Sazhin recalled.
“Of course it is impossible to settle the nuclear problem in a single day. However, it seems certain agreements demanding the presence of ministers were achieved,” Sazhin noted.
At the same time, no certain achievements were declared after the talks. “It is difficult to count on positive results in a resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis. There are two-sided reasons for this,” Vladimir Yevseyev, the director of the Center of Socio-Political Studies, told Vestnik Kavkaza. “The West wants to get the maximum from Iran, it wants to get unilateral concessions from Iran, but Iran doesn’t want this of course. On the other hand, Tehran wants the sanctions to be lifted as quickly as possible, but it is impossible. They will realize these reasons someday. It needs time.”
According to Yevseyev, Iran’s offers and proposals cannot be considered a working option: “They need another plan which should be developed, considering Western interests. From this point of view, development of a road map on settlement of the Iranian nuclear crisis and duration of each stage of the plan, it is difficult to speak about progress in the process until there are realistic views. They need time to realize the reality. There is another problem. A trend of mistrust towards Hassan Rouhani’s policy on approaching the West is growing in Iranian society. If the trend increases, if conservative forces against any dealings with the West stand against Rouhani, I think the negotiations will be frozen for some period of time. That is why we can speak only about a hope that common sense will win both in Iran and the West and that this common sense will enable the development of a road map. But I wouldn’t speak about breakthroughs in the talks.”
