Elements of agreement available in Iran talks

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says “all the elements of an agreement” are available in the nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 and the two sides should now work toward building the agreement.

“All the elements of an agreement are already on the table and the task of diplomats now is to correctly put together a package,” Lavrov told reporters in Moscow on Friday.

He called on the negotiating sides to “show political will so that the result is based on the balance of interests, and is not subjected to attempts at the last minute to haggle something beyond what is realistic.”

“I am proceeding from the assumption that, in the end, common sense and the aim to reach a compromise on this long-standing problem will after all prevail,” the top Russian diplomat said.

Iran and the P5+1 countries – the US, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany – are in a final stage of talks in the Austrian capital city of Vienna to work out a comprehensive deal aimed at ending the longstanding standoff over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy program before a November 24 deadline.

Sources close to the Iranian negotiating team say the main stumbling block in the way of resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear energy program remains to be the removal of all the bans imposed on the country, and not the number of Iran’s centrifuges or the level of uranium enrichment.

Tehran wants the sanctions entirely lifted while Washington, under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby, insists that at least the UN-imposed sanctions should remain in place.