Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 15
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
Trilateral talks between Iranian foreign minister with his U.S. counterpart John Kerry and the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton started in Vienna, the capital city of Austria on Oct. 15, the Islamic Republic's official IRNA news agency reported.
The sides are discussing the progress of the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Tehran and the P5+1 group.
Earlier Iran's top nuclear negotiator Abbas Araqchi held trilateral nuclear talks with Wendy Sherman, the U.S. State Department's chief nuclear negotiator and EU Political Director Helga Schmid on Oct. 14.
Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) held their latest round of talks in New York on September 18-26 to work out a final agreement aimed at ending the long-standing dispute over Tehran's nuclear program before a Nov. 24 deadline.
Last November, Iran and the P5+1 clinched an interim nuclear accord, which took effect on Jan. 20 and expired six months later. However, the two sides agreed to extend their talks until Nov. 24 as they remained divided on a number of key issues.
The West wants Iran to have single-digit thousands of active centrifuges, meaning it would take Tehran a long time to use them for producing high-level enriched uranium for nuclear weapon. Tehran who has 19,000 centrifuges has rejected reducing the number of active enrichment machines.