The NATO meeting in Madrid next week is not a timetable for these discussions to be concluded, Turkey said following talks in Brussels on Monday with Finland, Sweden, and Turkey.
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO. Turkey, meanwhile, has opposed the bids, claiming that Helsinki and Stockholm have supported Kurdish insurgents and placed arms embargoes on Ankara.
Last week, Turkey claimed that the documents it had received from Sweden and NATO in response to the written demands it had earlier submitted to the two contenders had fallen far short of its expectations and that any conversations would need to start by addressing Turkish concerns.
Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin said Ankara expected Sweden to respond right away in response to activities taken by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant organization in its nation while speaking to reporters in Brussels with Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal.
It “now rests on the direction and speed at which these nations will take initiatives,” he said, for the Nordic membership bids to forward.
He said that the discussions in Brussels with representatives from Sweden, Finland, and NATO took place in a “open and serious atmosphere.”
We will all have the chance to assess the direction of this process as we see these developments, he continued.
Onal claimed that Sweden and Finland should adopt a different strategy and that Ankara needed “binding guarantees” to allay its worries.
We don’t regard any deadlines as limiting us. The manner and speed with which these nations satisfy our expectations will determine the pace and scope of this exercise, he said.
The leader of Finland’s delegation to the negotiations in Brussels, Petri Hakkarainen, stated that the parties had achieved “concrete progress” on a number of problems. But he said that figuring out the others will take time.
On June 29–30, NATO’s top brass will meet in Madrid. All 30 NATO countries must consent before joining the organization. Turkey has been a member of NATO for more than 70 years and has the second-largest army in the organization.
