Turkey has acknowledged that Sweden and Finland have taken concrete steps to ease Ankara’s concerns about their NATO bids and the three sides will resume talks, the Swedish delegation’s chief negotiator Oskar Stenstrom said on Thursday, as quoted by Reuters.

“We see that Turkey has recognized that both Sweden and Finland have taken concrete steps in this agreement, which is a good sign,” a Swedish official told a news conference at NATO headquarters after talks between the three parties.

He said that new talks will take place, but the schedule for future meetings between the representatives of the three countries has not been determined.

The new development came after Turkish media reported on January 24, citing diplomatic sources familiar with the situation, that Ankara had indefinitely postponed the resumption of talks with the two countries regarding their accession to NATO, with a meeting scheduled for February.

The information was confirmed two days later by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who said that holding a trilateral meeting with the two Scandinavian countries “makes no sense” after a protest in Stockholm during which a copy of the Koran was burned.

Turkey has blocked Sweden and Finland from joining NATO since last May, accusing the two countries of harboring Kurdish fighters and sympathizers Ankara considers terrorists, especially members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and their allies in northern Syria and Iraq.

Accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO blocked by Turkey and Hungary

Turkey and Hungary are the only states among NATO’s 30 member states that have not ratified the Nordic countries’ accession to the alliance, despite Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s assurances about their country.

A delegation from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party said during a visit to Finland this week that it could not say when Budapest would ratify the two Scandinavian countries’ NATO membership.

Csaba Hende, deputy speaker of the Budapest legislature and head of the Fidesz delegation, said after a meeting in Helsinki with Finnish lawmakers that “this is a promising start, but it does not say when a decision will be made or what it will be. “

He said he still had work to do to convince some of his colleagues in parliament, noting that “I am working to get a majority (for ratification)”.

Fidesz has a two-thirds majority in the Budapest parliament following legislative elections last April.

Matti Vanhanen, the speaker of the parliament in Helsinki, said on Wednesday that the Hungarian delegation did not put forward any conditions for the ratification of Finland’s accession to NATO.

“They fully recognized that Finland meets the criteria for NATO membership,” the Finnish official emphasized.

Sweden and Finland signed protocols on joining NATO on July 5 this year, after submitting official applications for joining the alliance in May.