Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Bilstrom said, on Wednesday, that his country has made progress in talks with Turkey regarding joining NATO.
This came in statements he made to the Swedish state television, during which he touched on the tripartite meeting with his Turkish counterparts, Mevlut Cavusoglu, and his Finnish counterpart, Pekka Haafsto, on the sidelines of the NATO meeting Tuesday in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
Bilstrom stressed that they had made “progress in the talks during the NATO meeting, and I plan to visit Turkey soon and meet Cavusoglu.”
And he added, “There we will have the opportunity to deal with many files, and I look forward to this meeting with great impatience.”
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He added that he did not know when Turkey would agree to his country’s membership in NATO, and continued: “It would be wrong to set a specific time date, but it became clear to me in yesterday’s meeting that the more progress we make, the faster the Turkish parliament will ratify.”
Turkey signed a tripartite memorandum with Sweden and Finland regarding combating terrorism, during the NATO summit in Madrid, Spain, on June 28.
Within the framework of the memorandum, a permanent joint mechanism was formed. It held its second meeting in Stockholm earlier on Friday, while the Finnish city of Vantaa hosted the first meeting on August 26.
