Iran nuclear talks: brinkmanship in Lausanne as deadline looms

With less than two days to go before an end-of-March deadline for agreeing a political framework to contain Iran’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief, the atmosphere in Lausanne has taken on the nervous edge of an endgame.

The foreign ministers from the seven countries involved arrived on Sunday, with the UK foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, flying in last, a position usually taken by the nerveless, implacable Russian, Sergei Lavrov. This time, he turned up more than an hour earlier, at about 7pm on Sunday evening.

Asked if he was hopeful about the outcome, Lavrov growled: “I am not paid to be optimistic”. John Kerry, sitting opposite him, quickly added: “You’re not paid enough to be optimistic.”

Whatever his salary, the Russian underlined his insouciance on Monday morning by arriving more than 10 minutes late for a critical ministerial meeting between the six world powers and Iran.

The arrival of the foreign ministers has added some negotiating muscle, but it also brings added pressure and complications. The ministers come with their own agendas and timetables. While his colleagues say they can stay to the deadline on Tuesday, Lavrov has been insisting that he has business elsewhere. A spokeswoman said he will leave later on Monday and return “if there is a realistic chance of a deal” on Tuesday.

The negotiations are still stalled within sight of the finishing line. There are many issues up in the air in Lausanne, but diplomats here say they believe most would resolve themselves if a couple of obstinate problems could be overcome.

Those central problems are the extent to which Iran would be allowed to carry out research and development on new centrifuge models in the last years of a deal, and – the stickiest problem by far – the lifting of UN security council sanctions.

A third problem seems to have been largely resolved in the past few days. Iran wanted to keep some centrifuges spinning at its underground enrichment plant in Fordow. The six powers negotiating with Tehran proposed a compromise in which a few hundred centrifuges spin but do not process uranium. They would purify other elements used for medical and scientific purposes.

The R&D issue has only been half-resolved. Iran has accepted strict limits on its development of new superefficient centrifuges during the first 10 years of a deal, but after that there are differences. The six-nation group wants restrictions to extend for a further five years, wary that new centrifuges could drastically reduce Iran’s breakout time (the period it would need to build a bomb, should it make that decision). Iran rejects such prolonged curbs on its centrifuge development, saying it would render the country dependent on foreign technology.

The lifting of UN security council sanctions is a tougher nut to crack. Iran is demanding the lifting of all such punitive measures and all six UNSC resolutions passed under chapter VII of the UN charter, which categorise Iran’s nuclear programme as illegitimate and a threat to international peace and stability.

“The core difference is on the UN security council sanctions,” said one western diplomat in Lausanne. “The UN security council resolutions have special meaning for them.”

This is a black-and-white issue for which it will be hard to find a compromise. The six-nation group is offering a basket of relief measures, lifting the EU oil embargo and removing banking restrictions, in moves synchronised with the suspension of corresponding US sanctions. But it insists that some UN sanctions must stay in place until Iran has convinced the international community it has no intention of pursuing a weapons programme, a task which could take many years.

European diplomats say the next day or so will show whether Iran’s seemingly immovable stance on UN sanctions is a hardball negotiating tactic, or whether the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has left them no negotiating space. According to Thomas Erdbrink, of the New York Times, Khamenei said on his website this morning: “Sanctions must be lifted in one go, not as a result of future Iranian actions.”

There are additional, related problems. The west will not consider the lifting of any UN sanctions without “snapback” mechanisms that would immediately restore them in the event of Iranian non-compliance without the need for a security council vote. But European diplomats here say that certain permanent members represented in Lausanne, thought to include Russia and possibly China and France, jealously guard the privileges of membership and do not like the idea of automatic measures without their assent. Furthermore, Iran wants to know who should judge whether it is compliant and what parallel sanctions there would be for western violations.

At this moment of impasse, the brinkmanship is beginning to show. The Iranian deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, appeared on Iranian television on Sunday night, saying that Iran would not agree to shipping out its existing stockpile of low enriched uranium, which has been seen until now as an integral part of a deal.

“The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our programme and we do not intend sending them abroad,” Araqchi said in AFP’s translation of his remarks. “There is no question of sending the stocks abroad.”

In response to Araqchi’s remarks, a senior state department official said there was no concrete agreement in place about what to do with the Iranian stockpile.

“There is no question that the disposition of their stockpile is essential to ensuring their programme is exclusively peaceful,” the official said. “There are viable options that have been under discussion for months, including shipping out the stockpile, but resolution is still being discussed.”

But Araqchi had broken one of the tenets of the recent rounds of talks, by negotiating explicitly in public. More of this is expected in the last hours of the talks as time gets shorter and the stakes higher. As they say in Lausanne – and before that in Geneva and Vienna: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”