2024-04-04 08:17:57
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Text: Editorial Cuba Noticias 360
Sweden officially became the 32nd member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), being the last Nordic nation to join those ranks, after Hungary lifted the last obstacle to its entry.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson met this Thursday with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to deposit the “instrument of accession” with the State Department, a formal document for Stockholm to join the bloc.
Kristersson reiterated in Washington that Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine was the trigger for this integration step as a way to reinforce the security of his country and the region.
“Russia will remain a serious threat to Euro-Atlantic security for the foreseeable future. “Precisely for this reason, Sweden requested to join the NATO defense alliance,” the prime minister said during the meeting, quoted by international media.
For his part, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed Sweden from social media and announced the raising of that nation’s flag for next Monday.
Like Finland, Sweden maintained its neutrality as a hallmark of the foreign policy of the Nordic states, but after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this was broken.
In May 2022, both nations requested entry into the alliance, at which time NATO officials assured the Swedish Government that their incorporation process would be “the fastest in history.”
Despite this, and the fact that Finland achieved member approval by entering NATO in April 2023, Sweden remained in suspense.
Opposition from Türkiye and Hungary forced Sweden to accept this long delay. The approval of the Turkish Parliament took about 20 months, while that of Hungary took a few more weeks. In both cases some additional diplomatic efforts were necessary.
The German media Deutsche Welle shared the words of Oscar Jonsson, a researcher at the Swedish Defense University, who stated that “the fact of having declared his desire to join NATO, but seeing himself blocked by his potential allies, was the ‘worst place for Sweden to be stranded, even temporarily.”
Jonsson commented to the aforementioned media: “If we look only at the recent empirical data, we can see that Russia has invaded two states that it perceived as being on the path to joining NATO (Georgia and Ukraine), but none of the member states of NATO.”