After urgent high-level talks with the leaders of the three countries, Alliance Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that “we now have an agreement that paves the way for Finland and Sweden to join NATO.” He described it as a “historic decision”. Among its many catastrophic consequences, President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted Sweden and Finland to abandon their long-standing non-aligned status and apply for NATO membership as protection against an increasingly aggressive and unprovoked long border with Finland. Under NATO treaties, an attack on any member would be considered an attack on everyone and would trigger a military response from the entire alliance. From left to right: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, Turkish Foreign Minister Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde signs a memorandum in which Turkey agrees to the accession of Finland and Sweden to the defense alliance in Madrid, Spain on Tuesday, June 28, 2022. Bernat Armangue / AP NATO is operating by consensus, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to block the Scandinavian couple, insisting they change their stance on Kurdish rebels, whom Turkey considers terrorists. After weeks of diplomacy and hours of talks on Tuesday, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said the three leaders had signed a joint agreement to break the deadlock. Turkey has said it “got what it wanted”, including “full co-operation… in the fight against” guerrilla groups. Stoltenberg said the leaders of the 30-nation alliance would formally invite the two countries to join on Wednesday. The decision must be ratified by all individual nations, but he said he was “absolutely certain” that Finland and Sweden would become members, something that could happen within months. Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said the deal was “good for Finland and Sweden. And good for NATO”. He said the completion of the accession process should be done “the sooner the better”. “But there are 30 parliaments that have to approve it and you never know,” Anderson told the Associated Press. Turkey hailed Tuesday’s agreement as a triumph, saying the Scandinavian nations had agreed to crack down on groups Ankara sees as threats to national security, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, and its expansion into Syria. He also said they agreed “not to impose embargo restrictions on the defense industry” in Turkey and to take “concrete measures to extradite terrorist terrorists”. Turkey has asked Finland and Sweden to extradite wanted individuals and lift arms restrictions imposed after Turkey’s 2019 military invasion of northeastern Syria. Turkey, in turn, agreed “to support at the Madrid Summit in 2022 the invitation of Finland and Sweden to join NATO”. The details of what exactly was agreed upon were unclear. Amineh Kakabaveh, an independent Swedish Kurdish MP backed by the government for a majority in parliament, said it was “worrying that Sweden is not revealing what promises it has made to Erdogan”. Anderson rejected proposals that Sweden and Finland had given too much. Asked if the Swedish public would see the agreement as a concession to issues such as the publication of Kurdish fighters that Ankara considers terrorists, Anderson said “they will see that this is good for Sweden’s security”. US President Joe Biden congratulated the three nations on a “critical step”. Amid speculation about the US role in ending the stalemate, a senior government official said Washington had made no concessions to Turkey to persuade it to accept a deal. However, the official said the United States had played a critical role in helping bring the two sides closer, and Biden spoke with Erdogan on Tuesday morning at the behest of Sweden and Finland to encourage talks. The agreement came at the start of a crucial summit, dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that will determine the course of the alliance for years to come. The summit began with a leaders’ dinner hosted by King Felipe VI of Spain at the 18th-century Royal Palace in Madrid. At the top of the agenda in Wednesday and Thursday’s meetings is the strengthening of defense against Russia and the support of Ukraine. The invasion of Moscow on February 24 shook European security and brought city bombings and bloody land battles back to the continent. NATO, which had begun to turn its attention to terrorism and other non-state threats, had to face rival Russia once again. Biden said NATO was “as united and galvanized as I think we ever were.” A Russian rocket attack on a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk on Monday was a grim reminder of the horrors of war. Some saw the timetable as the leaders of the Group of Seven met in Germany shortly before the NATO summit, as a message from Moscow. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who will address NATO leaders via video on Wednesday, described the attack on the mall as a “terrorist” act. Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko traveled to Madrid to urge the alliance to provide his country with “everything it needs” to end the war. “Wake up, guys. This is happening now. You will be next, it will be knocking on your door in the blink of an eye,” Klitschko told reporters at the summit. Stoltenberg said the meeting would set out a plan for the alliance “in a more dangerous and unpredictable world” – and that means “we need to invest more in our defense”, Stoltenberg said. Only nine of NATO’s 30 members meet the organization’s target of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense. Spain, which hosts the summit, spends only half of it. Stoltenberg said Monday that NATO allies would agree at the summit to increase the alliance’s rapid reaction force almost eightfold, from 40,000 to 300,000 troops. The troops will be based in their home countries, but will be dedicated to specific countries on the east side of NATO, where the alliance plans to build up stockpiles of equipment and ammunition. Beneath the surface, there are tensions within NATO over how the war will end and what, if any, concessions Ukraine needs to make to end the fighting. There are also differences over how hard the line must be taken towards China in NATO’s new Strategic Concept – all its priorities and goals once a decade. The latest document, published in 2010, did not mention China at all. The new idea is expected to define NATO’s approach to issues ranging from cybersecurity to climate change – and China’s growing economic and military reach and the growing importance and power of the Indo-Pacific region. For the first time, the leaders of Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand are attending the summit as guests. Some European members are wary of the US hard line in Beijing and do not want China as an adversary. In the Strategic Concept, NATO is to declare Russia the number one threat. Russia’s state space agency, Roscosmos, marked the start of the summit with the release of satellite imagery and coordinates of the Madrid meeting room, along with those of the White House, the Pentagon and government headquarters in London and London. Berlin. The agency said NATO was going to declare Russia an enemy at the summit, adding that it was publishing exact coordinates “just in case”. More
