Turkiye may 'freeze' Finland, Sweden bid to join NATO

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Sweden’s Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu attend a signing ceremony of a memorandum on the Nordic countries’ NATO in Madrid, Spain on June 28, 2022 [TUR Presidency/ Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Anadolu Agency]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned yesterday that Ankara can still “freeze” Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO unless they meet Ankara’s security demands.

Last month, Turkiye lifted its objection to the Nordic countries’ applications to join NATO by signing a MoU in which Stockholm and Helsinki agreed to address Turkey’s “pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly … in accordance with the European Convention on Extradition.”

At the time, Erdogan warned that Ankara would block the process if they fail to extradite “73 terrorists”.

Sweden and Finland’s accession still needs to be approved by the parliaments of all 30 NATO members and Turkey’s parliament could refuse to ratify the deal.

“I repeat it again that we will freeze their NATO accession process if the conditions are not met.”

He added: “We see that especially Sweden does not give a good impression in this regard. Turkiye’s stance about this issue is very clear, the rest is their business.”

READ: The ‘Middle East NATO’ may go public or be postponed

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.