Ankara Says Did Not Receive Finland's Proposal For Separate NATO Accession Bid

Turkey has not received a proposal from Finland for a separate application to join NATO, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday

ANKARA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 26th January, 2023) Turkey has not received a proposal from Finland for a separate application to join NATO, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that the country could consider an accession procedure separate from Sweden after Stockholm hit a roadblock on its NATO path over tensions with Ankara. However, later in the day he denied that Helsinki was considering such a possibility and said that Finland and Sweden continued to act jointly.

"We did not receive an official proposal, so it would be wrong to discuss this," Cavusoglu said at a joint press conference with his Serbian counterpart, Ivica Dacic, in Ankara.

Cavusoglu added that Turkey was having less issues with Finland in the process of the country's accession to NATO than with Sweden.

On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Sweden should not expect Turkish support for its bid to join NATO, since the EU country's far-right activists burned a copy of the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm after receiving permission from the authorities.

Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership on May 18, 2022. Turkey initially blocked the process for considering the applications, but in late June, Turkey, Sweden and Finland signed a security memorandum that was supposed to take into account Ankara's concerns, including the extradition of Kurdish activists. To date, Sweden and Finland's applications have not been ratified by only two countries out of 30 � Hungary and Turkey.