For the first time in more than a year and a half, negotiators from Iran and the so-called P5+1 countries – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the U.S., Russia, China, France and England, plus Germany – will sit down with their Iranian counterparts this Friday in Istanbul to talk about Tehran’s nuclear program. In the weeks leading up to the talks, getting all six countries to agree on a cohesive bargaining strategy with Iran has been almost as hard as getting Tehran to agree to, well, anything. “I do not think that we’ll come to any unified position before the negotiations, but rather have a menu of options,” Sergey Ryabkov, Russian deputy foreign minister told reporters in Washington on Tuesday. Each country comes to the talks with its own agenda – and sometimes a schedule, as is the case with the U.S. elections, threatens to overshadow any potential progress. Here’s a look at the five key positions as they stand ahead of the talks
