Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson emerged from talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan without the guarantees he was seeking for Turkey’s approval of Sweden’s NATO membership. In a joint news conference with Kristersson, Erdogan made it clear that unless Sweden fulfilled its commitments to address Turkey’s security concerns under the terms of a trilateral memorandum signed in Madrid, such approval would not be forthcoming.
Sweden and Finland applied for membership in the Western security bloc following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Turkey and Hungary are the sole countries that have not ratified their accession. Turkey has a laundry list of demands, including returning dozens of people it has accused of terrorism and severing ties with a Syrian Kurdish group backed by the United States.
