The two had a meeting shortly before the NATO Summit began
The president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke today with the president of the European Council Charles Michel, after earlier linking Ankara’s “green light” for Sweden’s NATO accession to the start of Turkey’s EU accession negotiations, as it became known from diplomatic sources.
On the eve of the two-day NATO summit in Vilnius, the Turkish president, who has been blocking Sweden’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty for 14 months, set a new condition to lift his veto: the resumption of accession negotiations with the EU, which are in deadlock for many years.
In an attempt to remove the Turkish objections, NATO’s gg Jens Stoltenberg arranged a meeting between Erdogan and Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson in the late afternoon. But diplomatic sources said that meeting was interrupted in order for Erdogan to hold talks with Michel.
Earlier, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that Sweden’s NATO membership and Turkey’s membership in the EU are not linked.
Turkey applied to join the then EEC in 1987 and the EU in 1999, but accession negotiations that began in 2005 have been stalled for years.
Source :Skai
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