The war in Ukraine has forced a major rethink in European security, with both Sweden and Finland abandoning their long-standing policy of non-alignment and applying for NATO membership last year. But while Finland was admitted into NATO this April, delays have persisted on Sweden’s entry, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan linking a serious of unrelated issues to Ankara’s ratification of Sweden's accession – the latest of which is a potential sale of US F-16 fighter jets to Turkey. We discuss what Sweden’s entry to NATO would actually mean with Sweden's top diplomat, Foreign Minister Tobias Billström.
Billström appears optimistic that Turkey and Hungary will ratify Sweden’s NATO accession at more or less the same time. "I asked my counterpart, the foreign minister of Hungary, just the other week at the NATO foreign ministers' meeting, if Hungary still holds to its promise that they won't be the last to ratify us - meaning that once Ankara starts to ratify, Hungary will follow swiftly. And his answer was 'yes, we still will maintain our promise'. The Hungarian parliament has already done all that is necessary. They only have a final vote left. They have done all the committee work, so they can move quite rapidly, once there is 'white' smoke from Ankara," Billström says.
