Sweden and Germany say NATO expansion on track despite Turkish doubts
Sweden said on Tuesday it was abiding by the extradition deal struck with Turkey to smooth the way to NATO membership, as doubts remain over whether Ankara will approve the alliance’s expansion.
Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said a first extradition to Turkey announced last week was carried out under Swedish and international law under the agreement.
She spoke at a press conference with visiting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said he believed the accession process for Sweden and its neighbor Finland was on track.
Both Nordic countries turned the page on decades of neutrality and applied to join NATO after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, seeking protection from their newly hostile and unpredictable neighbor to the east.
Turkey held up the process while seeking assurances that Sweden and Finland would root out Kurdish terrorists, leading to an agreement in late June on the extradition of terrorist suspects and other issues.
Despite the agreement, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last month that he was still willing to “freeze the process” if Sweden and Finland did not take the necessary steps.
Their applications to join NATO must be approved by all 30 existing members, 23 of which have given the green light so far.
“I am very sure that the states that have not yet ratified it will do so soon, including Turkey,” Scholz said during his visit to Stockholm.
“I’m confident that it will now happen very quickly. I don’t want to commit to a date, but I think we can see that everyone is quickly trying to bring this to an end.”
Andersson, who has an election coming up, said Sweden would continue to abide by the memorandum of understanding signed with Turkey and Finland at the NATO summit in Madrid in June.
The agreement said Turkish deportation requests for terrorist suspects would be dealt with “quickly and thoroughly” and that Finland and Sweden would crack down on funding and recruitment by the Kurdish insurgent group PKK.
“The extradition cases handled in Sweden will of course be processed according to Swedish and international law. That is also something we have agreed on,” says Andersson.
Sweden has received assurances from Germany, Great Britain and others that they would step in if the country was attacked in the interim period before it joins NATO.
The decision to apply for membership came after cross-party talks and a security review in May that said Russia’s actions had worsened Sweden’s security environment.
The review said bilateral arrangements and a new European Union defense policy were no substitute for NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense guarantee, guaranteed by US military firepower.
While Sweden has no land border with Russia, Finland’s accession would more than double the length of the NATO-Russia border in what Western analysts have described as a spectacular self-goal by the Kremlin.
Updated: August 16, 2022, 12:58 p.m