Odds of reaching nuke deal over 50%, Russia says

The chances of agreeing a nuclear deal with Iran are “more than 50/50,” Russia’s chief negotiator in six-party talks in Switzerland told Russian news agency RIA Novosti Saturday.

“I think that the chances are more than 50/50,” Sergei Ryabkov was quoted as saying in Lausanne ahead of a Tuesday deadline to agree the outlines of a nuclear deal.

Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program grew frantic on Saturday amid signs of discord, with the French and German foreign ministers joining US Secretary of State John Kerry in talks with Tehran’s top diplomat ahead.

An Israeli minister warned that the terms of the framework deal were potentially dangerous. “We don’t see a full agreement emerging… We do see directions some of which are very worrying from our point of view,” Israel’s Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told Channel 2 on Saturday night.

With just four days to go until the deadline, negotiators in the Swiss town of Lausanne were meeting multiple times in various formats to produce what they hope will be an outline of an agreement that can become the basis for a comprehensive deal to be reached by the end of June.

Iranian negotiator Majid Takht-e Ravanchi denied a news report that the sides were close to agreement on a text, and other officials spoke of remaining obstacles, including Iranian resistance to limits on research and development and demands for more speedy and broad relief from international sanctions.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters as he arrived that the talks have been “long and difficult. We’ve advanced on certain issues, not yet enough on others.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, meanwhile, suggested the blame for any impasses lies with the U.S. and its partners.

“In negotiations, both sides must show flexibility,” he wrote on Twitter. “We have and are ready to make a good deal for all. We await our counterparts’ readiness.”

Iranian nuclear agency chief Ali Akbar Salehi described one or two issues as becoming “twisted.” He told Iran’s ISNA news agency that the sides were working to resolve the difficulties.

Kerry met early in the day with Zarif, before extended sessions with Fabius and Germany’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The foreign ministers of Russia, China and Britain also were expected in Lausanne on Sunday.

“We now are standing at the threshold of a political resolution and a collective political impulse,” said Russian deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. “I think these chances (of an agreement) significantly exceed 50 percent.”

But diplomats at the talks said their presence does not necessarily mean a deal is almost done.

Steinmeier avoided predictions of an outcome, saying only that a nuclear deal could help ease Mideast tensions.

“The endgame of the long negotiations has begun,” he said.

As Iran hailed advances toward the deal on Friday, an Israeli official described the terms of the looming agreement as “incomprehensibly” bad and rejected the Obama administration’s contention that it would keep the regime a year away from accumulating enough fissile material for a bomb.

Estimating that a framework deal would indeed be signed soon, and that a full agreement would follow in June, the official lamented the US-led negotiators’ apparent readiness to remove sanctions without Iran being required to halt its global terrorist activities, and listed a host of areas in which Tehran was working against American, Israeli and moderate Arab interests without being made to pay a price.

His comments underlined immense Israeli opposition to the emerging deal that saw Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobby against it in Congress earlier this month to the abiding anger of the Obama Administration. Charged with forming a new government on Wednesday after winning the March 17 elections, Netanyahu vowed to patch up ties with the US, but insisted Israel would do everything to thwart the emerging Iranian nuclear deal, which he said was “an agreement that endangers us, our neighbors and the world.”

The deal taking shape will leave Iran with 6,100 centrifuges spinning, will involve a phased lifting of economic sanctions, and will be reached as scheduled early this coming week, Israeli television reported Friday night.

Negotiators have yet to resolve several key issues, including the fate of some 13,000 centrifuges that Iran will be barred from using under the deal, whether Iran will be allowed to continue its R&D work on advanced centrifuges, and what will become of Iran’s already enriched uranium, the report on Israel’s Channel 2 news said.

Officials have told The Associated Press that the US may allow Iran to run hundreds of centrifuges at the Fordo bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites. The Iranians would not be allowed to do work that could lead to an atomic bomb and the site would be subject to international inspections.

Instead of uranium, any centrifuges permitted at Fordo would be fed elements used in medicine, industry or science, the officials said.

Even if the centrifuges were converted to enrich uranium, there would not be enough of them to produce the amount needed to make a weapon within a year — the minimum time frame that Washington and its negotiating partners demand.

A nearly finished nuclear reactor would be re-engineered to produce much less plutonium than originally envisaged.

Still problematic is Iran’s research and development program.

Tehran would like fewer constraints on developing advanced centrifuges than the US is willing to grant.

Also in dispute is the fate of economic penalties against Iran.

In addition, questions persist about how Iran’s compliance with an agreement would be monitored.

Fabius said France was not yet satisfied on that point.