The NATO summit starts on Wednesday, but this Tuesday the day will already be full of parallel meetings in Madrid, such as Sweden and Finland, who want to join the organization, with Turkey, which puts obstacles to the claim.
The Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will meet with his Finnish counterpart, Sauli Niinisto, and with the Swedish Prime Minister, Magdalena Andersson, to discuss the candidacies of Sweden and Finland, in the presence of the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Jens Stoltenberg.
Turkey announced in mid-May the blocking of the Swedish and Finnish candidacies, and it is expected that the issue will be one of the highlights of the Madrid summit.
Negotiations have been underway to try to overcome the Turkish veto in recent weeks and Stoltenberg said in Brussels on Monday that he could not make any promises about an outcome this week, saying only that he expected “progress”.
Turkey accuses Sweden of harboring militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization that Ankara considers terrorist.
Ankara also demands the lifting of the arms export blockades by Stockholm and Helsinki following Turkey’s military intervention in northern Syria in October 2019, the tightening of Swedish anti-terrorist legislation and the extradition of several people to the calling them terrorists.
The Madrid summit will bring together delegations from more than 40 countries, including 30 NATO members and other guests, and is taking place conditioned by the war in Ukraine.caused by the Russian invasion of February 24.
The meeting was initially convened and conceived before the Ukraine war and counts among the guests countries from Asia and the Pacific (Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand), the Middle East (Jordan) and Africa (Mauritania). , as well as the six EU states that are outside of NATO (Finland, Sweden, Austria, Cyprus, Ireland and Malta).
Most of the delegations arrive in Madrid on Tuesday, and before the official work of the summit begins, on Wednesday, they will meet at a gala dinner, offered by King Felipe VI.
Earlier in the day, Stoltenberg and the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, host of the meeting, will visit the Madrid Fair (Ifema), where the summit will take place.
The NATO Secretary General will also inaugurate a forum dedicated to the summit, a side event to the meeting organized by the Spanish Thinkgray Real Instituto El Cano.
During the day, Sánchez will receive at the seat of the Spanish Government, Moncloa, some of his counterparts, all from countries outside the European Union: the United States (Joe Biden), Australia (Anthony Albanese), New Zealand (Jacinda Ardern) and Iceland (Katrin Jakobsdóttir).
The work of the summit begins on Wednesday and lasts two days, during which NATO will adopt a new Strategic Concept, a document that defines its priorities for the next decade and that, according to Stoltenberg, should define Russia as the largest and most direct threat. to the countries of the military alliance.
Reinforcements of the alliance’s forces in Eastern Europe and high-availability troops should also be approved in Madrid, in what will constitute “the largest review” of NATO’s “collective deterrence and defense” strategy since the Cold War.
A new aid package will also be approved for Ukraine and Georgia, Bosnia and Moldova will also have new NATO aid plans.
Source: Observadora
