London: NATO’s 30 ambassadors on Tuesday signed the accession protocols of Sweden and Finland to join the transatlantic military alliance. It was the next step in NATO’s biggest expansion procedure since the mid-1990s, and a direct reaction through the alliance to Russia’s war. opposed to Ukraine.
The protocols still want to be ratified by the legislatures of all allied governments before the official members of the two Nordic countries, but the group’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, called it “a truly historic moment for Finland, Sweden and NATO. “
“With 32 nations on the table, we will be even stronger,” Stoltenberg said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed out that NATO’s eastward expansion into Europe is one of the key points that prompted him to order the invasion of Ukraine in February. The land borders of Russia.
One of the demands Russia made to Ukraine before the invasion was that it never join NATO, in part because of Moscow’s concerns about the presence of NATO countries on its immediate border.
“With Sweden and Finland, we don’t have the mess we have with Ukraine. They need to register with NATO, go ahead,” Putin told Russian state television last week. But he added a warning: “If army contingents and infrastructure are deployed there, we will have to respond in type and create the same threats to the territories from which the threats are created for us. “
Any potential NATO member will have to have the blessing of all existing members, and Turkey, first of all, said it would block donations from clubs in Finland and Sweden unless Turkish opposition members in European countries move to Ankara. Turkey struck a deal with the Nordic countries at a NATO summit last week and abandoned that threat, but warned it could still block its club if it felt it was not meeting its share of the market.
Stoltenberg on Tuesday expects ratification to move forward.
“There were security issues that needed to be addressed, and we did what we do in NATO: we discovered non-unusual terrain,” he said.
Sweden and Finland may take months to become official members of NATO, as each country in the alliance has its own express legislative procedures to follow. But representatives of any of the countries can now attend NATO meetings, even if they don’t have the right to vote. , and they will have greater access to intelligence.
However, prior to ratification, they are not through the NATO alliance’s mutual defense clause, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. So far, this clause, Article Five of the NATO Charter, has been invoked only once, the United States when it asked its allies to help overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that allowed al-Qaeda to attack on September 11, 2001.
“We will be even more powerful and our other people will be even safer as we face the biggest security crisis in decades,” Stoltenberg said Tuesday.