US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Saturday that there were still “difficult issues to resolve” before reaching a nuclear accord with the Iranian regime.
Mr. Kerry posted that message on Twitter after a meeting with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian regime’s foreign minister, and Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.
The Iranian regime’s insistence on the lifting of a United Nations ban on shipments of conventional weapons in and out of the country has emerged as one of the remaining obstacles to an agreement, The New York Times reported.
Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, returned to Vienna on Saturday morning to join Mr. Kerry and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s chief diplomat. Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, was expected to arrive later in the day.
It is also not clear when Russia’s foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov and China’s foreign minister Wang Yi might attend.
Diplomats missed the original June 30 deadline for finishing the accord, and the talks have already been extended three times since then with no firm target date for a conclusion.
