Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu has informed that on the 9th of March, tripartite negotiations with Sweden and Finland on the admission of both countries to NATO will be resumed, writes Reuters.
The talks were suspended in January after a Koran was burned during protests outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm. Çavuşoğlu said that his colleagues will attend the meeting on the 9th of March in Brussels. However, Turkey’s foreign minister also pointed out that Sweden is still not meeting the commitments it made when signing the memorandum at the NATO summit in Madrid.
«Unfortunately, we have not seen satisfactory steps from Sweden on the implementation of the Madrid memorandum. It is not possible for us to say «yes» to Sweden’s NATO bid before we see these steps,»
he said.
Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine. Ankara accuses Stockholm of harboring terrorists and has demanded that the individuals in question be extradited before Turkey agrees to Sweden’s NATO membership.
The USA and other NATO countries hope that it will be possible to declare the two Nordic countries as members of the alliance at the summit planned in Vilnius in July. Ankara has given hints that it will approve Finland’s accession but has not given a guarantee that it will allow Sweden to join as well.
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