Araz News: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said at a meeting with students in Tehran that the struggle against the United States will continue even if anuclear deal should be reached.

The U.S. is “the absolute embodiment of arrogance,” Khamenei said. “The Iranian nation must be ready to continue the struggle against the arrogant world powers,” Iran’s English-language PressTV reported.

Khamenei’s statements are possibly an attempt to prepare Iranian public opinion for an impending deal with the West.

Though intensive negotiations took place in Vienna during the weekend it is still unclear if the sides are nearing an agreement. Both sides hint that the talks won’t be extended any further than the current deadline on Monday, but it is difficult to ascertain whether these hints are authentic or a tactical maneuver, meant to increase pressure on the other side.

During the weekend, the U.S. negotiation team head, Wendy Sherman, updated National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister of Israel Yossi Cohen about the progress in the negotiations for the first time since the latest round of talks began.

On Friday, the European Union announced that the deadline for the ongoing Iran nuclear talks in Vienna will be extended to July 13. The same day, Iranian President Hassan Rohani said that the nuclear negotiations were in a “sensitive stage.”

Rohani made the comments after returning to Iran from a visit to Moscow as Kerry was scheduled to meet his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif at the Palais Coburg Hotel in the Austrian capital in an attempt to extricate talks from their current stalemate.

One of the toughest issues facing negotiations is the arms embargo imposed on Iran a number of years ago by the UN Security Council. The Iranians are demanding the embargo be lifted as part of the nuclear accord, and China and Russia – the Islamic Republic’s two biggest arms suppliers – have supported the demand.

An additional issue has to do with the timetable for the removal of sanctions on Iran as well as the different ‘snap-back’ mechanisms governing the reimplementation of sanctions should Iran fail to make good on its part of the bargain.

via haaretz