Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Jawad Zarif called the meeting of the “Five” on the JCPOA a good one, which was held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. “It was a good meeting,” Zarif said.
In addition to Zarif, the meeting was attended by Russian Foreign Ministers Sergey Lavrov, China – Wang Yi, France – Jean-Yves Le Drian, Germany – Heiko Maas and the head of European diplomacy Federica Mogherini.
The Six (Great Britain, Germany, China, Russia, the USA, France) and Iran announced on July 14, 2015 the achievement of the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan (JCPOA). The agreement provided for the lifting of sanctions in exchange for limiting Iran’s nuclear program. The deal in its original form did not survive even three years: in May 2018, the United States announced a unilateral withdrawal from it and the restoration of stringent sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
For the first time, Tehran abandoned a number of nuclear restrictions on the anniversary of the US withdrawing from the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program – Washington left the deal on May 8, 2018, Tehran responded exactly a year later, which it called “strategic patience.”
The refusal to fulfill a number of points of the JCPOA on the Iranian nuclear program in the first stage concerned the reserves of enriched uranium and heavy water. Subsequently, authorities in Tehran announced the second phase of a reduction in nuclear deal obligations, saying Iran would enrich uranium at the level that the country needed. The third stage began on September 6: then Iran announced that it had started working with a number of centrifuges, without limiting itself in the field of nuclear research and development to the provisions of the JCPOA.