TEHRAN — Saeed Khatibzadeh, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on Monday that the exact date to return to the Vienna negotiations will be set in the current week after further consultation with the JCPOA Joint Commission, the P4+1 nations, particularly China and Russia.

In response to a Tehran Times tweet, Ulyanov, the Russian envoy to international organizations in Vienna, tweeted, “As far as I remember after the meeting in Brussels on October 27 the Iranian side was more specific and expressed the intention to announce the exact day of resumption of the #ViennaTalks not just soon but precisely the next week.”

In response to a question posed by the Tehran Times correspondent about the truthfulness of this story, Khatibzadeh said that he has not seen Ulyanov’s tweet, and won’t comment on it.

“However, the exact date was supposed to be set after further consultations between Iran and the P4+1, especially our Chinese and Russian friends. The exact date will be announced this week,” Khatibzadeh said in his weekly press briefing. 

Khatibzadeh dismissed rumors about the presence of foreign ministers in the Vienna talks, saying that the negotiations will be pursued at the level of deputies. 

“There is no issue at the level of foreign ministers right now, and it is currently at the level of political deputies, because different issues need to be discussed. When these talks start, which will be in the next two or three weeks, they are going to be followed with more energy,” he added. 

He continued by saying that as the government has repeatedly stated, “talk for talk” is not Iran's policy for dialogue.

“The preparations that have been made are to get out of the Vienna impasse, and if the U.S. wants to continue the impasse, it will be a difficult path for them to return to the nuclear deal,” he remarked. 

The spokesman noted that the JCPOA was once “negotiated, signed, sealed and put in a box.”

“What we are talking about today is not about the nuclear deal as a whole. No one is negotiating the JCPOA as a whole. What we are talking about is the effective return of the United States and the lifting of sanctions in an irreversible manner,” he elaborated. 

Khatibzadeh reiterated that Iran will not stop any remedial measures until “we are sure that all U.S. sanctions are lifted effectively and in one go."

When asked about the sanctions, the spokesman said that Iran never showed any contradictory behavior. 

“We did not show any contradictory behavior nor did we say contradictory words, and we always said our points as the responsible government, and it does not matter to us in which direction the United States moves in its domestic policy towards Iran until the lifting of unilateral, extraterritorial and illegal sanctions… as the goal of the talks in Vienna,” he reiterated. 

Khatibzadeh pointed out that all the sanctions imposed after the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA are related to the deal and have harmed Iran's interests that must be lifted.