2023-04-17 17:24:00
Sweden started, this Monday, its biggest military maneuvers in 25 years, with 26 thousand soldiers from 14 countries, while facing obstacles to join NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, western defense bloc).
“Maneuvers are taking place in the air, on land and at sea in a large part of the country,” the Swedish Armed Forces said in a statement.
They must continue until May 11 and concentrate on the north and south of the Scandinavian country, as well as on the strategic island of Gotland, the Armed Forces said.
Attending are military personnel from the United States, United Kingdom, Finland, Poland, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Denmark, Austria, Germany and France, countries that are mostly members of NATO.
Along with Finland, Sweden applied to join the Western military alliance in May 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ending two centuries of neutrality and military non-alignment.
Finland officially became the 31st member of NATO on April 4, but the Swedish candidacy, which will have to be ratified by all member states of the organization, still faces opposition from Turkey and Hungary.
Turkey particularly criticizes Sweden for not extraditing dozens of Kurdish activists or people accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having participated in an attempted coup d’état in 2016 (which has already served as an argument for a large-scale purge in all sectors of Turkish public administration and civil society).
Western diplomats are still hoping that the Turkish head of state will change his mind if he wins the presidential elections next May, or that his social-democratic opponent, if he wins, will give the ‘green light’ to Sweden’s membership of the Alliance. Atlantic.
Sweden approached NATO by joining its Partnership for Peace in the 1990s, but without membership, the Scandinavian kingdom is not covered by Article 5, which guarantees collective defence.
This is a delicate situation, because as Sweden is the only Nordic country outside NATO, it might become a strategic territory for Russia in case of conflict, experts warn.
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