Thursday, 5 May 2022 (YJC)_ Sweden's foreign minister says the United States has guaranteed that Stockholm will receive support if it applies to join NATO.
Sweden's Foreign Minister Anne Linde announced yesterday (Wednesday) after meeting with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in Washington that Sweden had received assurances from the United States that it would consider a 30-year bid for NATO membership. The coalition member will receive a security guarantee from the United States, and the United States will support it.
Sweden and Finland were excluded from NATO during the Cold War, but the two European countries claim that after the annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014 and the launch of a special Russian military operation in Ukraine on February 24, Reuters reported. It has prompted them to reconsider their security policies and consider their NATO membership highly likely.
However, Sweden and Finland, as reported by Reuters, will be very vulnerable during the process of reviewing NATO membership applications, which may take up to a year to be approved.
According to the report, Linde told Swedish television after meeting with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in Washington:
Naturally, I do not go into too much detail, but I am very confident that we now have a US guarantee that our security guarantees are not very coherent. These are things you can only get if you are a full member of NATO.
Lindsay declined to say what security guarantees she received from Blinken, Reuters reported.
He said in this regard:
These (security guarantees) mean that it is clear to the Russians that if they take any negative action against Sweden, which they have threatened to take, it will not be something that the United States will allow unanswered.
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