ShareMUSCAT: The United States wants a nuclear agreement “as soon as possible”, Iran said after rare talks on Saturday, as US President Donald Trump threatens military action if they fail to reach a deal. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who briefly spoke face-to-face with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff during the indirect meeting in Oman, said the talks would resume next Saturday.
“The American side also said that a positive agreement was one that can be reached as soon as possible but that will not be easy and will require a willingness on both sides,” Araghchi told Iranian state television. “At today’s meeting, I think we came very close to a basis for negotiation... Neither we nor the other party want fruitless negotiations, discussions for discussions’ sake, time wasting or talks that drag on forever,” he added.
Oman’s foreign minister acted as intermediary in the talks in Muscat, Iran said. The Americans had called for the meetings to be face-to-face. However, the negotiators also spoke directly for “a few minutes”, Iran’s foreign ministry said. It said the talks were held “in a constructive and mutually respectful atmosphere”.
The long-term adversaries, who have not had diplomatic relations for more than 40 years, are seeking a new nuclear deal after Trump pulled out of an earlier agreement during his first term in 2018. Araghchi, a seasoned diplomat and key architect of the 2015 accord, and Witkoff, a real estate magnate, led the delegations in the highest-level Iran-US nuclear talks since the previous accord’s collapse.
The two parties were in “separate halls” and were “conveying their views and positions to each other through the Omani foreign minister”, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei posted on X. The process took place in a “friendly atmosphere”, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi said.
Iran is seeking relief from wide-ranging sanctions hobbling its economy. Tehran has agreed to the meetings despite baulking at Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of ramping up sanctions and repeated military threats. Meanwhile the US, hand-in-glove with Iran’s archenemy the Zionist entity, wants to stop Tehran from ever getting close to developing a nuclear bomb.
There were no visible signs of the high-level meeting at a luxury hotel in Muscat, the same venue where the 2015 agreement was struck when Barack Obama was US president. Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal earlier that the US position starts with demanding that Iran completely dismantle its nuclear program — a view held by hardliners around Trump that few expect Iran to accept.
“That doesn’t mean, by the way, that at the margin we’re not going to find other ways to find compromise between the two countries,” Witkoff told the newspaper. “Where our red line will be, there can’t be weaponization of your nuclear capability,” he added. Hours before they began, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One: “I want Iran to be a wonderful, great, happy country. But they can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s adviser Ali Shamkhani said Iran was “seeking a real and fair agreement”. The 2015 deal that Trump abandoned aimed to make it practically impossible for Iran to build an atomic bomb, while at the same time allowing it to pursue a civil nuclear program. Iran, which insists its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes, stepped up its activities after Trump withdrew from the agreement.
On Friday, Witkoff wrapped up his latest talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, after Trump urged his Russian counterpart to move quicker to end what he said was the country’s “senseless war” with Ukraine. Trump has been pressing Moscow and Kyiv to agree a ceasefire deal but has failed to extract any major concessions from the Kremlin, despite repeated negotiations between Russian and US officials.
“Russia has to get moving,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, adding that the conflict, which began in Feb 2022 when Moscow sent troops into Ukraine, was “senseless” and “should have never happened”. Kyiv and several of its Western allies suspect Russia of stalling the talks on purpose. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of dragging Beijing into the conflict and on Friday claimed that hundreds of Chinese nationals were fighting at the Ukraine front line alongside Russian troops.
Trump’s post came just before Witkoff’s meeting with Putin at the presidential library in Saint Petersburg, which state news agencies said lasted four and a half hours. The Kremlin said afterwards only that the meeting had taken place and “focused on various aspects of the Ukrainian settlement”, without elaborating. Witkoff, who visited a synagogue in St Petersburg earlier on Friday, went to Oman on Saturday for talks with Iran.
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said earlier that he expected no diplomatic “breakthroughs” from the talks — Witkoff’s third with Putin since February. He also said “maybe” to a question about whether a possible meeting between Putin and Trump would be discussed. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, suggested British and French troops could adopt zones of control in the country, in an interview with The Times published Saturday.
Kellogg suggested they could have areas of responsibility west of the Dnipro river, as part of a “reassurance force”, with a demilitarized zone separating them from Russian-occupied areas in the east. “You could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after World War II,” he told the British newspaper. “I was speaking of a post-ceasefire resiliency force in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty. In discussions of partitioning, I was referencing areas or zones of responsibility for an allied force (without US troops),” he said later on X.
Kyiv said last week that its forces had captured two Chinese nationals in the eastern Donetsk region fighting for Moscow. The Kremlin denied the claim, while Beijing warned parties to the conflict against making “irresponsible remarks”. “As of now, we have information that at least several hundred Chinese nationals are fighting as part of Russia’s occupation forces,” Zelensky told military chiefs from allied countries in Brussels. “This means Russia is clearly trying to prolong the war — even by using Chinese lives.” – Agencies
