Turkey favors approval of Finland’s NATO bid before Sweden’s

Finland’s foreign minister says the Nordic country still hopes to join NATO along with Sweden, following Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s comment that Ankara could accept Helsinki’s bid while continuing to block its Swedish neighbors .

“A lot of work has been done in the last ten months to achieve this goal. Sweden is our closest ally in defense and foreign policy,” Pekka Haavisto said Monday.

“We have effectively underlined to all our future NATO partners, including Hungary and Turkey, that Finnish and Swedish security go hand in hand. We share the common long coast of the Baltic Sea and whenever NATO plans its defense in this region, it must both Finland and Sweden,” he added.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said on Twitter on Monday that he discussed “the current situation” in a phone conversation with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Ankara has refused to ratify the two countries’ NATO membership, largely because Sweden has refused to extradite dozens of suspects Ankara links to banned Kurdish fighters and a failed 2016 coup attempt.

Turkey had also reacted furiously to a decision by Swedish police to allow a protest earlier in January in which a far-right extremist burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.

It is also outraged by a Swedish prosecutor’s decision not to press charges against a pro-Kurdish group that hung an effigy of Erdogan on his ankles outside the Stockholm court.

Following those incidents, Ankara last week suspended the two countries’ accession negotiations.

The decision threatens to derail the bloc’s hopes of expanding to 32 countries at a summit scheduled for July in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.