MÜNSTER (dpa-AFX) – Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock does not want to declare the negotiations to revive the Vienna nuclear agreement to have finally failed, despite months of standstill and the brutal crackdown on system-critical protests. “There are also some who say, then one should say the whole thing has failed,” said the Green politician on Friday at the end of a meeting with her counterparts in the G7 group of economically strong democracies in Münster. But if you say this in diplomacy, “then that means, you accept it now, that there will be further enrichment.”
She was “deeply convinced: Iran, the regime will not get any better if they have a nuclear weapon. It will only get worse for regional security and also for the people of Iran”. Baerbock demanded from Tehran: “There must be no further enrichment, there must be access for the (International Atomic Energy Agency) IAEA to the nuclear power plants.” This is “continued to be what we demand from Iran and what Iran has also committed itself to in international treaties.”
The then US President donald trump unilaterally terminated the agreement in 2018 and imposed severe sanctions. After that, Tehran no longer adhered to the conditions for limiting the nuclear program. Leading politicians in the US and Europe recently questioned the nuclear talks with Iran over the course of action against the protests. The agreement is intended to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. In return, economic sanctions against Tehran are to be lifted. Also because of Iranian military aid for Russia in the war against Ukraine, observers currently consider an agreement in the nuclear dispute to be rather unlikely./bk/gba/DP/he