“Some 95 percent of the deal is agreed,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Bloomberg Television on the sidelines of the 69th annual session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Saturday.
The Russian top diplomat noted that the remaining five percent consists of “two or three very difficult issues” that to be settled in the coming months.
Iran and its negotiating partners - the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany - are currently in talks to work out a final agreement aimed at ending the longstanding dispute over Tehran’s civilian nuclear energy program within a November 24 deadline.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described the talks as “serious, intense and very frank.”
“Time is short, but issues are not that difficult to resolve,” Zarif told reporters in New York on Friday. “Everything is very far and very close, it depends on how you look at it and what time of the day you start looking at this question. We are still apart, there are still quite a bit of differences on all these issues.”
Last November, the two sides clinched an interim nuclear accord, which took effect on January 20 and expired six months later. However, they agreed to extend their talks until November 24 as they remained split on a number of key issues.
