A meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara will answer Sweden's question of whether its bid to join NATO will gain momentum.
The fourth meeting on a permanent joint mechanism between Türkiye, Finland and Sweden will be held on Wednesday, Türkiye's Directorate of Communications said Monday. Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership soon after Russia launched its war in Ukraine in February 2022. Although Türkiye approved Finland's membership to NATO, it is waiting for Sweden to abide by a trilateral memorandum signed last June in Madrid to address Ankara's security concerns.
Wednesday's meeting at the Presidential Complex will be chaired by Akif Çağatay Kılıç, newly appointed chief adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to the directorate. The meeting will be attended by Stian Jenssen, director of the Private Office of the NATO secretary-general; Jan Knutsson, state secretary of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, and Jukka Salovaara, permanent state secretary for the Finnish Foreign Ministry.
Sweden passed an anti-terror law in November, hoping that Ankara would approve Stockholm's bid to join NATO. The new law, effective as of June 1, allows authorities to prosecute individuals who support terrorist groups. Several foreign ministers hope that Türkiye would approve Sweden's bid ahead of a NATO summit that will be held in Lithuania's capital Vilnius on July 11-12. Addressing reporters in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it is "appropriate" for all NATO members, including Türkiye, to raise security concerns they have over NATO's enlargement as Sweden looks to join the transatlantic alliance. "It's a process and it's appropriate that during that process, every member of the alliance be able to raise any concerns or issues that it might have," he said during a joint news conference with his Italian counterpart.
Blinken acknowledged the expediency with which Sweden and Finland’s membership bids have been addressed, saying, "If you look at this historically, the process for both Finland and Sweden has been very, very rapid, and appropriately so given the fact that both countries have been longtime partners of NATO, among the strongest democracies in the world, members of the European Union."
"And of course, the challenge posed to European security by Russia's aggression in Ukraine makes the matter even more urgent," he added.
The Nordic country also seeks to take concrete steps to assuage Türkiye's security concerns. On Monday, the Swedish government decided to extradite a man who was convicted of drug offenses in Türkiye in 2013 and has been living in Sweden for five years.
Ashraf Ahmed, the president of the legal board of the Justice Ministry, told Swedish state television SVT that the Supreme Court decided to extradite the 35-year-old man to Türkiye in May and the government approved the court decision.
The man, according to Aftonbladet newspaper, demanded that he should not be extradited to Türkiye, citing his support for the PKK terrorist group and downloading of ByLock, the encrypted messaging app of Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) which was behind the July 15, 2016 coup attempt in Türkiye. He was sentenced to more than four years in prison in Türkiye in 2013 for carrying a bag containing drugs. After he was released from prison in Türkiye on parole, the man traveled to Sweden and was arrested there in August 2022 upon the request of the Turkish prosecutors.