NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg believes Finland and Sweden will soon join the alliance with Türkiye’s approval, days after Stockholm said it had done everything it could to satisfy Ankara’s reservations about its membership.
"I’m confident the accession process will be finalized for Sweden and Finland and all NATO allies will ratify the accession protocols in their parliaments. That also goes for Türkiye," Stoltenberg told reporters on Tuesday after signing a joint declaration to expand cooperation at the alliance's headquarters alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel.
He said the membership process generally takes years but all 30 members invited Finland and Sweden to join and sign their accession protocols in July. Since then, 28 countries, except Türkiye and Hungary, have endorsed the move through their national procedures.
"This has been the quickest accession process so far in NATO’s modern history," Stoltenberg highlighted.
He also played down any risk that Finland and Sweden might come under attack or pressure for trying to join the military alliance, saying the United States and other allies have offered the two bilateral "security assurances" until they are full members.
"It’s inconceivable that Finland and Sweden will face any military threat without NATO reacting to that," Stoltenberg said.
Stockholm extradited three people, including a terrorist PKK member, to Türkiye in early December. Ankara welcomed the development but said it "wasn’t enough" for its approval. As of the new year, Sweden also took into effect a new amendment to their constitution enabling the government to "fight terrorism with new and more comprehensive means."
However, Sweden’s top court last month refused to extradite a prominent Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) suspect, Bülent Keneş, in a move that was displeasing for Ankara. Commenting on the matter, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said the country was not even "halfway" through fulfilling the commitments it made to secure their support.
On the contrary, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson maintained his country had lived up to its commitments and that the decision now "lies with Türkiye."
"Türkiye has confirmed that we have done what we said we would do, but they also say they want concessions we can't make, those we don't want to make," Kristersson remarked. "We are convinced that Türkiye will make a decision. We just don't know when," he said, adding that the decision depends on Ankara's internal politics as well as "Sweden's ability to be serious."
Türkiye has not yet publicly reacted to his remarks.
Alarmed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the two Nordic nations threw away their longstanding policies of military nonalignment and applied to join NATO in May but the process has been held up by the Turkish government’s objections to their accession on grounds of security concerns.
A month later in June, the sides inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) at a NATO summit in Madrid stipulating that the two countries take concrete steps to address said concerns, increase their crackdown on terrorist organizations like the PKK and the FETÖ, and extradite people suspected of terrorism-related crimes.
Türkiye has provided a list of wanted individuals to Sweden and expects the Scandinavian nation to take swift action to show that its demands are being addressed.
On the other side, Sweden announced in September that it was removing an arms embargo it had imposed on Ankara in 2019 following Türkiye’s counterterrorism operation in Syria.