Senior Iranian official says there is no deadline for exchanging messages with Washington through mediators or reviewing responses, according to reports

Senior Iranian official says there is no deadline for exchanging messages with Washington through mediators or reviewing responses, according to reports.

Indirect messaging through intermediaries has been the default channel in Washington-Tehran contacts whenever direct talks are politically untenable on the Iranian side, and statements denying any deadline are a familiar way of managing domestic expectations while keeping the channel alive. Remarks of this kind carry no commitment either way; they signal that contact continues and that neither side is under time pressure, which in past episodes of this sort has read as stalling rather than breakdown or breakthrough. The actors that matter are the mediators, typically Gulf or European, and the question that has historically separated noise from signal is whether the messaging is preliminary feelers or exchanges of concrete positions, the latter tending to surface only in leaks from the mediating capital rather than from Tehran itself. For crude, the established pattern is that talk of an open-ended process takes the edge off supply-risk premium without removing it, since nothing in the statement addresses enrichment, sanctions sequencing, or the regional file. What is worth watching is whether the mediator side corroborates active exchange and whether the rhetoric from either capital hardens around a specific issue, which is the tell that contacts have moved from atmospherics to substance.