Türkiye gives the green light to Sweden’s bid to join NATO

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed on Monday to send Sweden’s request to join NATO to parliament, in a move that appears to end months of debate over the issue that has affected the military alliance while the war in Ukraine drags on.

Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership last year, abandoning the decades-old policy of military non-alignment during the Cold War.

While Finland won approval to join the alliance in April, Sweden’s request has so far been rejected by Turkey and Hungary. Stockholm continues its bid to join the alliance during the Vilnius Summit, which kicks off on Tuesday.

On the eve of the summit, Stoltenberg held talks with Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Christjon for several hours as part of his efforts to break the impasse between the two sides.

Erdogan has been saying for months that Sweden’s accession depends on implementing an agreement reached last summer at the NATO summit in Madrid, adding that no one should expect concessions from Ankara.

Ankara says Stockholm has not taken enough action against what it considers terrorists, particularly members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey, the European Union and the United States list as a terrorist organisation.

Erdogan and Kristershon appeared calm before the meeting, with the Swedish leader joking about his plane parking next to the larger Turkish plane at Vilnius airport.

The statement said Sweden reaffirmed that it would not provide support to Kurdish groups and would strongly support efforts to allow Turkey to join the European Union.

Erdogan said on Monday that the European Union should open the way for Ankara to join it before the Turkish parliament approves Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance.

Stoltenberg said Erdogan had agreed to submit the request for approval by parliament “as soon as possible,” but did not specify a specific date for the approval of the request. It took the Turkish parliament two weeks to ratify Finland’s membership application.

And after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Thursday that Budapest would not stand in the way of ratifying Sweden’s application to join the alliance, Turkey’s approval would remove the last hurdle to its joining the military alliance.

The United States and its allies have been seeking pressure on Ankara for months. Some NATO members believe that Turkey, which in October 2021 ordered $20 billion worth of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters and nearly 80 sets of components to upgrade its existing warplanes, is using Sweden’s membership to pressure Washington over the planes. war.

US President Joe Biden, who welcomed the move, is set to hold direct talks with Erdogan during the summit.