KYIV. UkraineGate . 15 . January. 2023 | War News.
Turkey has declared that it is “unable” to ratify Sweden’s membership in NATO. Anadolu writes about this .
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“We are unable to send the law (on ratification) to the parliament,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign policy advisor Ibrahim Kalin told reporters.
“In principle, we would like to see them (Sweden and Finland) in NATO,” Kalin said. “They say they need a little more time. We told them, ‘You have to fulfill these conditions,’ meaning they have to send a serious signal to the PKK (terrorist group – ed.).”
Details
Ankara recognizes Sweden and Finland’s commitment to changing anti-terror legislation in line with an agreement signed between the three countries at a NATO summit last June, he added.
“Stockholm is fully committed to implementing the agreement signed last year in Madrid, but the country still needs six months to write new laws that would allow the judiciary to apply the new definitions of terrorism.”
Kalin also mentioned the war in Ukraine.
He defended Ankara’s decision not to join Western sanctions against Russia, pointing to the grain deal and prisoner swap as a success of its role as a mediator.
“Such local moments of de-escalation would help put an end to the war. If the goal of the sanctions was to change Russia’s behavior and put an end to the war, I don’t think it was achieved,” he said.
Earlier
Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbor Finland abandoned decades of military non-alignment and applied to join the Western defense alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
Turkey and Hungary remain the only NATO members that have not yet ratified the application through a parliamentary vote.
Ankara claims that Sweden, in particular, has failed to meet a number of commitments made by both countries at a NATO summit in June.
Source: Ukrgate
