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When the two Nordic countries confirmed their intention to join NATO this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeated his plans to block the application. Accusing Sweden and Finland of' "harboring" some of his worst enemies may not allow room for him to climb down.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared opposition to Finland and Sweden entering NATO
-Analysis-
LONDON — When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared his opposition to Finland and Sweden entering NATO, it took most of the West's top diplomatic experts by surprise — with the focus squarely on how Russia would react to having two new NATO members in the neighborhood. (So far, that's been a surprise too)
But now Western oversight on Turkey's stance has morphed into a belief in some quarters that Erdogan is just bluffing, trying to get concessions from the negotiations over such a key geopolitical issue.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.To be clear, any prospective NATO member requires the consent of all 30 member states and their parliaments. So Erdogan does indeed have a card to play, which is amplified by the sense of urgency: NATO, Sweden and Finland are keen to complete the accession process with the war in Ukraine raging and the prospect of strengthening the military alliance's position around the Baltic Sea.
Erdogan’s objections to Finland and Sweden joining NATO run deep. According to Mitra Nazar, the Turkey correspondent of the Dutch broadcaster NOS, “this is about a longstanding frustration with the Turkish government. Countries such as Finland and Sweden, but also the Netherlands according to Erdogan, give asylum to people who are labelled as terrorists in Turkey.”
This includes Kurdish fighters and supporters of the Gülen Movement, which Turkey believes is responsible for the failed coup in 2016. During a press conference this week, Erdogan demanded that Finland and Sweden end their supposed support for the Kurdish party (PKK). He also accused them of harboring PKK members and ordered the extradition of six alleged members from Finland and 11 from Sweden.
“Sweden is already the incubation center of terrorist organizations, they bring terrorists in their parliaments and allow them to speak,” Erdogan said according to Turkish Euronews. "We will not say 'yes' to them entering. Because then NATO ceases to be a security organization and becomes a place where the representatives of terrorists are concentrated.”
The Turkish president also demanded that Finland and Sweden lift their ban on arms exports imposed in October 2019 after the Turkish incursion in northern Syria. Although arms trade between these three countries is limited, Turkey would, on principle, refuse to expand the military alliance to countries that are blocking weapon deals, according to Turkish officials interviewed by Bloomberg.
Both Finland and Sweden were taken aback by the statements, wondering if things they said may have simply gotten lost in translation. According to the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, “Finland has been assured in the past that Turkey does not want to put any obstacles in the way of Finland and Sweden's possible NATO membership or complicate this process,” Finnish news organization YLE uutiset reported.
It raises the question: is President Erdoğan simply bluffing? Or does he really have something to lose if Finland and Sweden join NATO? The arms export ban argument seems to be symbolic above anything else. In fact, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that the arms restrictions go “against the spirit” of an alliance.
According to Bloomberg’s interview with five Turkey officials, the idea that Turkey’s opposition to Finland and Sweden joining NATO has anything to do with its ties to Russia, or Erdoğan’s friendship with Putin, has also been dismissed. It’s been publicly acknowledged too by diplomats, such as German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, that Turkey is treading cautiously in that regard. “I think at this moment everyone is aware of the responsibility they have in such a difficult situation,” she said according to German newspaper Die Welt.
Erdogan is focused on securing his re-election next summer.
The PKK narrative, however, has been around for a while, as Erdogan has made similar demands before. It’s yet to be employed as an ultimatum of this importance, leading many experts to believe that Erdogan is using it now to secure his re-election next summer. His popularity is down and the Turkish economy is suffering from 66.9% inflation, so he could benefit from a successful power move in international politics, and consequently bringing in PKK members into Turkey so they can face trial. Erdogan may find that climbing back down from his demands may become impossible.
Turkey may also be using the Nordic-NATO issue to push the U.S., and that Erdogan is simply using his veto against Finland and Sweden as leverage to gain what it really wants: to be included again in the F-35 advanced aircraft program. After Turkey purchased Russia’s S-400 missile defense system in 2017, Washington kicked Ankara out of the program and levied sanctions.
Yet the PKK extradition demands may be virtually impossible to obtain. Jonathan Eyal, the associate director of the Rusi thinktank told the Guardian that “It is not possible for either country … to change its domestic legislation on freedom of assembly… Sweden in particular has an active Kurdish community that has political support.”
For now, Finland and Sweden’s membership is still pending. The initial veto by Turkey has, at least, ensured that the first stage of the accession process may take longer than the two weeks planned.
Jussi Halla-aho, the chairperson of the Finnish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, “It’s mostly a question of Turkey’s domestic policy and desire to promote things that are important to it,” reports the Helsinki Times. “It’s unrealistic to think that the accession process of a country could be thwarted by a single member.” Everyone may have to think again.
When the two Nordic countries confirmed their intention to join NATO this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeated his plans to block the application. Accusing Sweden and Finland of' "harboring" some of his worst enemies may not allow room for him to climb down.
In his early journalistic writings, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez showed he had an eye for factual details, in which he found the absurdity and 'magic' that would in time be the stuff and style of his fiction.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.