US gives Iran ‘examples’ of sanctions it’s ready to lift

PARIS: The United States has shared with Iran details of the sanctions it is prepared to lift under a return to a nuclear accord, a senior official said late on Wednesday.

The United States and Iran are taking their second break from indirect talks in Vienna on how to restore a 2015 nuclear accord backed by President Joe Biden, after his predecessor Donald Trump walked away.

"This time, we have gone into more detail," a senior US official said of the latest EU-led talks. "We have provided Iran with a number of examples of the kind of sanctions that we believe we would need to lift in order to come back into compliance and the sanctions that we believe we would not need to lift," he said.

The official said the United States has also described a third category of "difficult cases" in which Trump reimposed sanctions that are not related to nuclear activity but were done "purely for the purpose of preventing" Biden from re-entering the deal.

Iran has pressed for the United States to lift all sanctions imposed under Trump before it rolls back the steps Tehran took away from the 2015 deal in protest. The US official said that the United States and Iran have not yet gone into detail on the question of who goes first.