No sign of quick NATO settlement as Turkey and Sweden dig in
Turkey and Sweden have hit a wall in NATO accession talks, with some predicting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will not budge until July.
The deadlock comes after Sweden announced it will not extradite anyone else to Turkey just to please Ankara.
“We have done what we said we would do, but they [Turkey] also say they want things we can’t or won’t give them,” Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Sunday (January 8).
“We have followed all parts of the agreement with Turkey and Finland, and we continue to implement them,” the Swedish Foreign Ministry also told EUobserver on Tuesday, referring to a pact on the NATO issue between Ankara, Helsinki and Stockholm.
“It is up to Turkey to decide when the ratification will take place. We cannot speculate on a specific date,” Sweden said.
“I think, now they are [Sweden] lost patience and want to make the Erdoğan regime understand that they are demanding the impossible,” added Bülent Keneş, an exiled Turkish journalist in Stockholm.
Sweden and Finland are ending decades of neutrality by joining NATO in response to Russia’s war in Europe, but Erdoğan has demanded that Sweden hand over Keneş and 42 others in exchange for ratification.
Swedish courts extradited two people but ruled that Keneş can keep his asylum, before Sweden now claimed that it has “followed all parts” of Turkey’s request.
Turkey had made similar demands from Finland, which did not extradite anyone.
“Finland has constructively implemented the trilateral memorandum agreed in Madrid last year,” the Finnish foreign ministry also told EUobserver on Tuesday, when asked if there was anything left to do.
The three capitals are intended to iron out their differences in a trilateral “contact group”.
But this last met on November 25 and there is no date for its first meeting this year.
For his part, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö warned in a speech on January 1: “It is possible that the delay will extend beyond [Finnish] parliamentary elections this spring [April]”.
Some EU diplomats fear the real deadline is the Turkish elections in June.
“Erdoğan needs a row to show voters that he is a strong man,” said an EU contact. “Two rich, Western countries seeking his agreement, doing his homework, submitting reports to him – it’s just too politically delicious,” he added.
Vilnius Summit
But one Turkey expert predicted that Erdoğan will orchestrate the climax of his “drama” to coincide with the NATO summit in Vilnius in July.
“Between the Turkish election and the NATO summit will be the big moment for a breakthrough,” said Asli Aydıntaşbaş, of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
“That is his question [Erdoğan’s] personality — he’s an insatiable negotiator and he felt the Swedes were willing to do anything, so his list kept getting longer,” she added.
And in the end, Keneş and Aydıntaşbaş added, NATO’s major powers will have to lean in to get a deal done, in a final undermining of the Nordic states.
“In the end, the Americans will have to come into the room and push… it will require American intervention,” Aydıntaşbaş said.
“If the US, UK, France and Germany, among others, put their weight on the issue, they can easily resolve the deadlock,” Keneş said.
Top NATO and EU officials have already applied gentle pressure in statements in Brussels on Tuesday.
“Finland and Sweden agreed to lift restrictions on arms exports [to Turkey], it has already been done. And they also agreed to work more closely in the fight against terrorism, that is also happening, says NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
He underlined that both were covered by NATO’s Article 5 Mutual Defense Clause in de facto terms pending ratification.
“It is inconceivable that Finland and Sweden will face any military threats without NATO reacting to it,” he said.
Meanwhile, Hungary, like Turkey, has held out against ratification, citing delays in parliament.
The Swedish Foreign Ministry said: “Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said that Hungary supports Sweden and Finland’s membership in NATO, and the Hungarian parliament will put the issue on the agenda during the first parliamentary session in 2023”. Finland expects the same.
But it is already too late to ratify during the first parliamentary session in February, Hungary’s opposition Center Party told this website, pushing the issue at least into March.
Winter War Morale
“Moscow is laughing at us,” the EU diplomat said.
But morale is also high in Finland, when you enter the Western defense alliance.
In his speech on January 1, Niinistö compared the Ukraine war to the Winter War of 1939, when a much smaller Finnish force defeated the Red Army.
The Finnish Foreign Ministry doubled down on the analogy when EUobserver asked if the same could be repeated in Ukraine this year.
“The Ukrainian people have shown incredible resilience and unity after Russia’s brutal aggression,” it said. “For many Finns, this bears a resemblance to Finland’s battle during the Winter War.”
And many ordinary Finns have paid 200 euros each to write messages on Finnish artillery shells sent to Ukraine as part of a pro-Ukraine fundraising project called SignMyRocket.com.
“Merry Christmas from the Kari family!”, was the message paid by Martti J. Kari, former Finnish intelligence chief.
“This year, the money I would have spent on fireworks went to this kind of rockets to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression,” Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen also said on Twitter.
“I have a feeling that my Finnish grandfather (a veteran of the Winter War and the Continuation War) sent his wishes with me, and so did my Estonian grandfather, a forest brother [anti-Soviet partisan]and my Estonian grandmother’s brothers, who died while I was being hunted by the NKVD [the Soviet secret police],” he added.