Turkey to resume NATO negotiations with Sweden and Finland next month

Ryan King

February 27, 10:17 AM February 27, 10:18 AM

Turkey will reconvene talks with Sweden and Finland on March 9 as Ankara continues to hamper their attempts to join NATO.

Last month, Turkey scrapped talks with the two countries after a Danish politician burned a copy of the Quran outside of a Turkish Embassy. Turkey's blocking of Sweden and Finland from joining NATO has created problems in Ankara's relations with other members of the powerful military alliance.

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"My colleagues will attend the meeting that will be held on March 9," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu revealed during a news conference, per Reuters.

The meeting will take place in Brussels. After Russia's brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine last year, both Sweden and Finland applied for membership in the NATO alliance, noting that the Kremlin has not attacked NATO members. However, Turkey and Hungary blocked their applications, grinding the process to a halt as the group makes key decisions by consensus.

Top of mind for Turkey is both countries' policies toward the Kurds. Turkey considers its domestic Kurdistan Workers' Party a terrorist organization and has been rankled by Western support for Kurdish groups in the Middle East.

Both countries have denied repatriation requests from Turkey for people with ties to the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen or the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has led to Ankara accusing them of harboring terrorists.

Following a string of negotiations between the two sides, Turkey has begun to signal it is warming up to Finland joining the alliance, but it has remained unsatisfied with Sweden. The three countries signed a memorandum at a NATO summit in Madrid last year, outlining steps toward Turkish ratification.

"Unfortunately, we have not seen satisfactory steps from Sweden on the implementation of the Madrid memorandum," Turkey's foreign minister added, per Reuters. "It is not possible for us to say 'yes' to Sweden's NATO bid before we see these steps."

Sweden is now mulling legislation aimed at appealing to Turkey's requests to make it illegal to join or endorse a terrorist organization, but there has not been a timeline set for the legislation to pass.

The United States and other NATO allies have backed both Sweden and Finland's attempted entrance into NATO. Hungary is the only other alliance member to stand in the way aside from Turkey, but the country is believed to have plans to hold a vote to ratify the two countries' applications in late March.

NATO is set to hold a summit on July 11 in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius.

NATO formally invitations Finland and Sweden to be a part of alliance

Mike Brest

June 29, 11:26 AM June 29, 11:27 AM

The NATO alliance formally prolonged invites to Sweden and Finland to sign up for the alliance on Wednesday, a historic enlargement for the allies.

Turkey, a day earlier, agreed to a trilateral agreement with the two aspiring NATO users and ended its holdup of Sweden and Finland's software procedure. The alliance is currently assembly in Madrid, and there is a large target on Russia's war in Ukraine, which has lately entered its fifth thirty day period.

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"The accession of Finland and Sweden will make them safer, NATO more powerful, and the Euro-Atlantic location a lot more secure," the alliance explained in a statement. "The safety of Finland and Sweden is of direct great importance to the Alliance, which include all through the accession course of action."

The decision will now go to each of the member states’ parliaments and legislatures for ultimate ratification. NATO leaders stated they assume the system to go rapidly.

"Then we will invite Finland and Sweden to sign up for NATO. And that demonstrates that NATO's door is open up. It demonstrates that President Putin has not succeeded in closing NATO’s doorway," NATO Secretary-Common Jens Stoltenberg claimed in a press meeting alongside President Joe Biden. "He is obtaining the reverse of what he would like. He wishes much less NATO President Putin is having much more NATO by Finland and Sweden becoming a member of our Alliance."

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov described their admittance to the alliance as "destabilizing."

“We take into account the enlargement of NATO a purely destabilizing element in global affairs,” Russian Deputy International Minister Sergei Ryabkov claimed, according to a report by Ria Novosti, a Russian state news company. "This does not incorporate security, neither to individuals who broaden and who are amongst the joiners, nor to other countries that understand the alliance as a risk."

Russia has usually criticized NATO's enlargement east toward its borders, but the war in Ukraine has unintentionally united NATO allies and brought the alliance nearer to Moscow's territory.