June 25. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, held a new telephone conversation this Saturday with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom he agreed to continue discussing Turkey’s reluctance to join Sweden and Finland to the Alliance and they agreed to continue talking about this issue next week in Brussels and Madrid.
“Good telephone conversation with President Erdogan, from our valuable ally Turkey to discuss the NATO membership applications of Finland and Sweden. We have agreed to continue talking about it next week in Brussels and Madrid,” Stoltenberg posted on his Twitter account. .
This Friday, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, stressed during an act in the province of Malatya that there will be no concessions. “We stand firm on Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership,” he said.
“We are not asking you for anything impossible. Either you support terrorist organizations or you don’t. You open your doors and welcome terrorist organizations, you allow all their activities, you turn a blind eye to their funding,” he said. “If you want to be an ally, you cannot see Turkey as an enemy. You cannot impose sanctions on it for its fight against terrorism,” he stressed.
In particular, he criticized the broadcast of interviews with leaders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on Swedish public television, SVT. PKK leader Ferhat Abdi Sahin and the leader of the Kurdish-Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG) Salí Muslim have recently been interviewed on the SVT.
“We are going to hold a special session in Madrid focused on terrorism in the south of NATO. We congratulate the secretary general and we also thank Spain,” he added, referring to the NATO summit on the 29th and 30th that he is preparing the Spanish capital.
Ankara considers that the Scandinavian countries grant favorable treatment to organizations such as the PKK, declared a terrorist group by their country. In addition, Finland and Norway have placed arms embargoes on Turkey.
Finland and Norway applied in May to join NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but entry requires the unanimous support of the 30-member military coalition.
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