The setting was right, but the atmosphere chilly. After a break of more than five months, talks on reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal resumed on Monday in the Palais Coburg, the luxury hotel in Vienna where the original pact was signed with much fanfare, in a more optimistic time.
With a more conservative government now in place in Iran, and a new set of Iranian negotiators who have said talks need to start with a complete lifting of sanctions, the mood was somber among Western negotiators.
But as the first round of formal discussions ended Monday, negotiators also tried to be upbeat.
Enrique Mora of the European Union, who is chairing the talks, said that Iran “recognizes the work done in the past six rounds and the fact that we will be building on that.” But he said that Iran was “insisting on sanctions lifting” immediately, which is likely to be unacceptable to Washington.
Iran is also insisting that the United States and its allies promise never to impose sanctions on Iran again, the country’s chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, a deputy foreign minister, told reporters after the talks.
According to a senior European official, who requested anonymity, the Iranian negotiator also said during meetings that Iran would further escalate its nuclear program if those demands were not met.
But in an important step to keep the negotiations alive, Iran agreed to resume talks on Tuesday in one of three working groups established in earlier rounds — on which sanctions would eventually be lifted by the United States. The other two working groups, on the nuclear issue itself and on implementation and the sequencing of each country’s actions in the event of a new deal, will not resume talks Tuesday.
Mr. Mora said the nuclear working group would meet on Wednesday. “There is a sense of urgency” to restore the nuclear deal, he said, but “there is no fixed timeline in my mind.’’
The Europeans had felt that significant progress in all three working groups had been made in the earlier talks — although awkwardly, since Iran refuses to talk directly to the American envoy, Robert Malley, and will do so only through the existing signatories — France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia and Mr. Mora.
The Biden administration has said it wants to return to the original nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which former President Donald J. Trump abandoned in 2018, calling it “the worst deal in history.”
The new Iranian government seems to believe the same, with Mr. Bagheri Kani repeating in an opinion article in the Financial Times his view that the very term “nuclear negotiations” is itself “rife with error.”
Iran’s first goal, he wrote, is “to gain a full, guaranteed and verifiable removal of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian people.” The talks, he said earlier this month, are “negotiations to remove unlawful and inhuman sanctions,” a theme also struck Monday in an article in the Iranian press by Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian.
To underscore that emphasis on lifting the punishing economic sanctions, Mr. Bagheri Kani brought to Vienna a delegation that includes deputy foreign ministers for economic and legal affairs, the deputy governor of the central bank and its former chief, the deputy economy and oil ministers and the economic adviser to Iran’s vice president.