Finland Delays Joining NATO at This Time
by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – Finland announced Monday that it would not seek to enter NATO alone at this time and still plans to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization only at the same time as its main military partner, Sweden, hopefully by July this year, Reuters reports.
Monday’s announcement by the Finnish foreign ministry came after Turkey suspended ongoing NATO accession talks with Sweden in an expression of outrage that a far-right Danish politician was allowed to burn a copy of the Koran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm last month.
“Those who allow such blasphemy in front of our embassy can no longer expect our support for their NATO membership,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement about the Swedish application for accession.
Erdogan added, however, that Turkey might agree to allow Finland to enter NATO without Sweden, Reuters said. Rebuffing this idea, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said at a news conference in Helsinki on Monday: “Finland and Sweden remain in the agreement, that irrespective of all current objections and obstacles, we will continue our joint journey into NATO. We plan to work on common measures to ratify our membership and join at the same time.”
“Our strong wish is still to join NATO together with Sweden,” Haavisto said. “We have underlined to all our future NATO partners, including Hungary and Turkey, that Finnish and Swedish security go together.”