PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron has called on the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure the strict compliance of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
“He urged the IAEA to ensure strict compliance with the provisions of the agreement in all its dimensions,” Macron’s office said in a statement, after Macron met Yukiya Amano, director general of IAEA.
The EU has reaffirmed its full commitment to the nuclear deal, regardless of whether the US pulls out.
But the bloc, reluctant to isolate itself completely from Washington, is also looking at whether it should as a next move step up criticism of Iran’s ballistic missile program and its role in what the West sees as fomenting instability in the Middle East, a senior EU official said.
President Donald Trump last week adopted a harsh new approach to Iran by refusing to certify its compliance with the nuclear deal, struck with the US and five other powers including Britain, France and Germany after more than a decade of diplomacy.
EU leaders were expected to “reaffirm (their) full commitment to the Iran nuclear deal,” after talks in Brussels on Thursday, according to a draft statement seen by Reuters.
The EU has been stepping up efforts to save the deal, saying it was crucial to regional and global security, and has appealed to the US Congress not to let it fall.
Trump has given Congress 60 days to see whether to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran, lifted under the pact in exchange for the scaling down of a program the West fears was aimed at building a nuclear bomb, something Tehran denies.
Should Trump walk away from the deal, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that Iran would “shred” it.
The bloc sees the agreement as a chief international success of recent years, and fears tearing it apart would hurt its credibility as well as harming diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions around another nuclear stand-off, with North Korea.
In outlining his tougher stance, Trump said Tehran must also be held accountable for advancing its ballistic program and its regional political role.
The EU is at early stages of considering intensifying its criticism of Iran on those issues, something France has been calling for.
“We will defend the nuclear deal and stand by the nuclear deal and implement the nuclear deal. But we also don’t want to be standing on a completely opposing side to the US,” the EU official said.
“If they withdraw, we would be left in a rather interesting company with China and Russia. So there may be an issue of separating the nuclear deal from the ballistic program and Iran’s regional role, sending signals on the latter two.”
The EU has stepped up contacts with the US Congress.
“They were never very fond of the nuclear deal in the first place but now the situation has changed a lot, both many Democrats as well as some Republicans feel like they need to play a more active role on foreign policy to restrain the president,” the official added.
IRGC threat
Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said on Thursday the ballistic missile program would accelerate despite US and EU pressure to suspend it, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
“Iran’s ballistic missile program will expand and it will continue with more speed in reaction to Trump’s hostile approach toward this revolutionary organization (the Guards),” the IRGC said in a statement published by Tasnim.
“Imposing cruel sanctions against the Guards and hostile approach of the rogue and brute (US president shows the failure of America and the Zionist regime’s (Israel) wicked policies in the region,” the Guards statement said.
Macron urges IAEA to ensure strict compliance of Iran nuclear deal
Macron urges IAEA to ensure strict compliance of Iran nuclear deal
Ukraine-Russia peace talks resume in Geneva with pressure on Kyiv
- Ukraine-Russia peace talks resume in Geneva with pressure on Kyiv
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticizes US pressure for Ukraine concessions
GENEVA: Negotiators from Ukraine and Russia began a second day of talks in Geneva on Wednesday, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the United States was putting undue pressure on him to bring an end to the four-year-old war in his country.
The US-mediated peace talks in Switzerland have been taking place as US President Donald Trump has twice in recent days suggested it was up to Ukraine and Zelensky to take steps to ensure the talks were successful.
In an interview with US website Axios published on Tuesday, Zelensky was quoted as saying that it was “not fair” Trump kept publicly calling on Ukraine, not Russia, to make concessions in negotiating terms for a peace plan.
Zelensky also said any plan requiring Ukraine to give up territory that Russia had not captured in the eastern Donbas region would be rejected by Ukrainians if put to a referendum.
“I hope it is just his tactics and not the decision,” Axios quoted Zelensky as saying in the interview.
Trump told reporters on Monday that “Ukraine better come to the table fast. That’s all I’m telling you.”
Talks come days before fourth anniversary of invasion
The Geneva talks resumed on Wednesday morning.
“The consultations are taking place in groups by areas within the political and military groups. We are working on clarifying the parameters and mechanics of the decisions that were discussed yesterday,” Ukraine’s lead negotiator and head of the National Security and Defense Council Rustem Umerov said on social media.
The talks come just days before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s 2022 invasion of its much smaller neighbor. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, millions have fled their homes, and many Ukrainian cities, towns and villages have been devastated by the conflict.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians.
Russian source called talks ‘very tense’
Umerov said Tuesday’s talks had focused on “practical issues and the mechanics of possible decisions,” without providing details. Russian officials made no comments on the talks.
However, Russian news agencies quoted a source as saying that the Tuesday talks were “very tense” and lasted six hours in different bilateral and trilateral formats.
Ukrainian government bonds fell as much as 1.9 cents on the dollar in morning trade in Europe on reports of stalled progress at the talks.
Before the talks began, Umerov had played down hopes for a significant step forward in Geneva, saying the Ukrainian delegation was working “without excessive expectations.”
The Geneva meeting follows two rounds of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi that concluded without a major breakthrough as the two sides remained far apart on key issues such as the control of territory in eastern Ukraine.
Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s national territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region seized before the 2022 full-scale invasion. Its recent airstrikes on energy infrastructure have left hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without heating and power during a harsh winter.
Zelensky thanked Trump for his peacemaking efforts and told Axios that his conversations with the top US negotiators, envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, did not involve the same kind of pressure.
Witkoff early on Wednesday said Trump’s efforts to get Russia and Ukraine talking were yielding fruit.
“President Trump’s success in bringing both sides of this war together has brought about meaningful progress, and we are proud to work under his leadership to stop the killing in this terrible conflict,” he said on X. “Both parties agreed to update their respective leaders and continue working toward a deal.”
