President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson will meet on Monday to discuss Türkiye's approval of Sweden's NATO membership bid, bloc's Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday, as the bloc's summit in Vilnius approaches.
Noting that there are some some unresolved topics to be discussed between the two countries, Stoltenberg said next week's meeting would adress these issues and that they aim to ensure approval of Sweden's NATO bid at the upcoming summit.
"Now it is time for Sweden to join the alliance," he said, adding that it was possible that a positive decision will follow at the alliance's summit in Vilnius next week.
Stoltenberg said that the PKK is a terrorist group and Swedish courts have taken important steps to fight it, adding that NATO allies take Türkiye's security concerns seriously.
He claimed that Türkiye, Sweden, Finland, NATO agree that full membership of Sweden is in security interest of all allies and that further delay in Stockholm's NATO membership will be welcomed by the PKK terrorist group and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sweden and its neighbor Finland dropped decades of military non-alignment and applied to join NATO in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Finland formally joined the bloc in April.
Earlier on Tuesday Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan voiced his country's reluctance to let Sweden into NATO and called on Sweden to fulfill its commitments under a deal it struck last year in Madrid aimed at addressing Ankara's security concerns.
It is not clear from a strategic and security perspective whether Sweden’s membership into NATO would be beneficial or prove to be a burden for the alliance, Fidan said.
Türkiye has delayed its final approval to Sweden’s membership in NATO, accusing the country of being too lenient toward anti-Islamic demonstrations as well as terrorist entities.
Recently, on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, Swedish police allowed the burning of the Quran outside a mosque in central Stockholm, citing "freedom of speech" after a court overturned a ban on a similar Quran burning.
