Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will back Sweden’s bid to join Nato.
After months of holding up the Scandinavian nation’s bid for membership, he has agreed to send the accession protocol to parliament ‘as soon as possible’.
Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg made the announcement after talks with Erdoğan and Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson on the eve of the alliance’s summit in Lithuania.
He said in a statement on Twitter this is a ‘historic step which makes all Nato allies stronger and safer’.
Stoltenberg declined to give a date for when Sweden’s accession would be ratified by the Turkish parliament, the grand national assembly, which would decide on the exact timing.
This comes less than two weeks after the country gave the go-ahead to two men to hold a Quran-burning protest outside a mosque, a ‘despicable’ decision which was widely condemned in Turkey.
Sweden and Finland applied to join Nato last year after Russia launched a war in Ukraine.
With the move, the two countries casting aside policies of military non-alignment that had lasted through the decades of the Cold War as the invasion reframed the security considerations.
But Sweden’s accession has been held up by objections from Turkey since last year.
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from News – Metro https://ift.tt/t4XEa5e
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