Sweden, Turkiye to Hold Talks at NATO Headquarters

On Thursday, senior officials from Sweden and Turkiye will meet at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, to discuss the Scandinavian country's stalled bid to join the military alliance.

One goal of the meeting is to identify any remaining objections Turkiye has to Sweden joining NATO ahead of its annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next Tuesday.

Sweden has made several overtures to Turkiye in the past 12 months.

These include lifting an arms embargo and cracking down on members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara has long considered to be a terrorist organization.

However, Ankara has also more recently condemned a Quran-burning protest in Stockholm, which Swedish authorities permitted citing freedom of speech.

Sweden and its neighbor Finland moved to join NATO after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Finland's membership bid was accepted in April, and Finnish officials will also join the talks on Thursday.

Turkiye and Hungary are the only NATO members that have continued to block Sweden's bid to join the alliance. The other 29 member states, as well as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, have all said Sweden has done enough to satisfy Turkiye's demands.