Finland and Sweden will send delegations to Turkey to unlock access to NATO

MADRID, 24 May. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The governments of Finland and Sweden will send delegations to Turkey on Wednesday in the hope of smoothing over the "concerns" publicly expressed by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and that weigh down the potential access to NATO of the two Nordic countries.

This was confirmed on Tuesday by the Finnish Foreign Minister, Pekka Haavisto, who referred during an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) to the "problems" that arose in the accession process.

Sweden and Finland submitted their request to join the Atlantic Alliance on Wednesday of last week, but the need for consensus among the 30 member states has not allowed formal negotiations to begin for now.

Haavisto has indicated that they will work to resolve Turkish doubts, some of them referring to the alleged permissiveness of Sweden and Finland towards groups considered "terrorists". However, the Finnish Foreign Minister has also pointed out that not all the complaints raised by Erdogan correspond exclusively to Helsinki or Stockholm.

The head of Finnish diplomacy thanked that the reaction to the request for accession has been "very positive" by the vast majority of countries and has recognized that some of them --including the United States-- have already provided "guarantees of security" in this interim period until full incorporation into NATO.

Likewise, it has once again justified Finland's change of criteria, which until now had always been reluctant to enter the Atlantic Alliance, referring mainly to the military offensive launched by Russia in Ukraine in February.

Russia is increasingly "unpredictable", in the opinion of Haavisto, who has warned of the risk of chemical or nuclear weapons being used and of the escalation of indiscriminate abuses attributed to Russian forces on Ukrainian territory.