According to the Swedish Foreign Minister, Sweden has already done everything necessary for its membership.
Turkey of the foreign minister Hakan Fidanin according to Turkey aims to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership by the end of the year, a high-ranking US official tells the news agency Reuters.
According to the Reuters source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Fidan is working to promote the ratification, which is currently being discussed by the Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
“To sum up the meeting, I would say that it [ratifiointi] will happen before the end of the year,” the official source said.
NATO the foreign ministers started their two-day meeting in Brussels on Tuesday. The Swedish foreign minister who arrived at the meeting Tobias Billström did not want to predict when the country would become a member of NATO. According to Billström, Sweden has already done everything necessary for its membership.
The foreign minister who represented Finland at the meeting Elina Valtonen (kok) stated that he was disappointed with the slow progress of Sweden’s NATO membership. Valtonen dared to be hopeful that the matter could proceed in the near future.
“We really have to hope that by Christmas the matter would move forward so that Sweden would become a member as soon as possible and within a few weeks”, he noted.
“It’s a shame that it didn’t happen now. We’re disappointed with that, that’s for sure.”
Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg repeated on Tuesday that he would have liked Sweden to have become a full member by the time of the meeting.
Turkey after a long delay, gave the green light to Sweden’s membership at the Vilnius NATO summit in July. The clearest step to progress the ratification, the president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan however, only took action in October by taking the bill to parliament.
Turkey and Hungary are the only NATO countries whose parliaments have not yet ratified Sweden’s NATO membership application. The progress of Hungary’s Sweden decision is still shrouded in obscurity.
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