Turkey Clears the Way for Sweden’s Entry to NATO on the Eve of Summit

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Turkey agreed on Monday to clear the way for Sweden to join NATO, a sudden reversal that allows the alliance to project an image of unity and expansion on the eve of a critical summit intended to prepare for what could be a long war to repel Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sweden’s imminent accession was a victory for Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO since 2014, who agreed last week to stay on another year to help guide a war effort in which NATO is a noncombatant, but a critical supplier of arms and training. It followed intense pressure on Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, particularly from President Joe Biden, who called the Turkish leader while on his way to Europe on Sunday.

Biden, just hours after landing in Lithuania before the opening of the summit Tuesday morning, celebrated the moment, saying in a statement that he was “ready to work with President Erdogan and Turkey on enhancing defense and deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

The statement was widely interpreted as an indication that the United States would sell Turkey the F-16 fighters and other armaments it has demanded. And Erdogan’s decision came just hours after he said the European Union should first advance his country’s bid to join the EU bloc before he would clear the path for NATO.

U.S. officials offered no details late Monday.

The reversal of Turkey’s objections will make Biden’s time at the summit considerably easier, taking one major problem off the agenda, and enable him to say that Vladimir Putin of Russia has gotten exactly what he did not want: an expanded, more directed NATO alliance that now also includes Finland.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a shock to Finland and Sweden, with long histories of military nonalignment, pushing both countries to seek membership in NATO, which they had been reluctant to do. But membership in the European Union alone was not security enough, both countries decided.

Their membership essentially turns the Baltic Sea into a NATO-dominated waterway, one that enhances NATO’s ability to protect its most vulnerable members: the Baltic nations. That includes the site of the summit, Lithuania, which borders both Russia and Belarus.

Analysts said Erdogan’s flip-flop was less about his having a change of heart than it was a decision that his political brinkmanship had gained him about as much as he could expect.

If he pushed it any further, he likely would not have received much more, but could have further jeopardized his standing among NATO allies. Turkey is already under scrutiny by Western powers for Erdogan’s close ties with Putin and for Turkey’s suspected role in helping Russian companies evade sanctions.

Continuing to block Sweden would have reinforced doubts about Turkey’s loyalty to the alliance.

“For geopolitical defense and broader economic considerations, it was in Turkey’s interest to let Sweden through at the summit,” said Emre Peker, the Europe director at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Biden, who arrived in Vilnius on Monday evening from London, must still try to find some agreed-upon language on Ukraine’s future relationship with the alliance. Negotiations among allies continued late into Monday night with no clear resolution.

The talks over how to satisfy Ukraine’s demands for entry has underscored how the NATO unity that Biden celebrates at every turn is getting harder to sustain as the war goes on.

The alliance works by consensus, increasingly infuriating its larger members, who supply much of the budget and heavy firepower. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who has spent the past week hopping between NATO capitals to drum up support, has threatened to skip the event if members do not make significant progress on forging a clear commitment for how, and when, it will be folded into the Western alliance.

Zelenskyy has attended a series of meetings critical to continued aid in battling Russia, so if he misses this one, it will be visual evidence of a breach.

In an interview broadcast on CNN on Sunday, Biden said of Ukraine, “I don’t think it’s ready for membership in NATO.” He then acknowledged a long-standing, deeper fear: That admitting Ukraine now, given NATO’s commitment to collective defense, would assure that “we are at war with Russia.”

That’s an argument the president has been making for 15 months.

Germany agrees with Biden, but several former Soviet bloc nations now in NATO disagree, saying Ukraine would bring one of the strongest and most battle-tested nations in Europe into the alliance and that it deserves entry now or as soon as there is a cease-fire.

All of this would have been hard enough to handle in a two-day summit. But it is complicated by the fact that the expansion of NATO is happening at the very moment European leaders are trying to sell their publics into turning the alliance into what it once was: a real fighting force that trains and patrols to keep Moscow at bay.

The membership disputes may be overshadowed by new worries that the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive is bogged down, and that Ukraine could run out of ammunition — one of several scenarios that U.S. intelligence officials say Putin is thinking about to turn humiliation into victory.

Biden has authorized the shipment of cluster munitions, controversial within the alliance, to fill the gap until more shells can be produced for Ukrainian artillery — and, though it was left unsaid, to better be able to destroy Russians in their deeply dug trenches.

Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, both made the case that U.S. allies would go along with the decision, even those that have signed the 15-year-old Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the production, sale or use of the weapons. The concern is that the munitions create a post-conflict hazard much like land mines. “Duds” that are scattered around the battlefield can explode years later, often when children pick them up.

The issue of exactly what to promise Ukraine will be the most vexing question at the summit.

The final communiqué is expected to say that “the rightful place of Ukraine is in the NATO alliance,” NATO-country officials said, but there is a debate about adding, “when conditions allow” or whether to detail some of those conditions. But beyond the phrasing, how Ukraine gets there, and through what process, remains in dispute.

Ukraine and the central European allies, especially those bordering Russia, say they want Ukraine to be promised immediate membership once the fighting stops.

The United States, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries reject that approach. They insist that Ukraine must undertake other reforms of its political, financial and judicial systems to qualify for membership. What matters now, they say, is practical help in the medium term — to commit to supporting Ukraine militarily and financially through the American presidential election and beyond.

Biden said last month that there will be “no shortcuts” for Ukraine getting into NATO, even after the war.

No matter how the wording is worked out, NATO officials say another key element of the summit will be a demonstration of practical support for Ukraine. Putin, several NATO leaders have argued, believes Europe’s commitment will flag — and that, combined with an ammunition advantage, would ultimately lead to Ukraine’s defeat.

So the next two days will be filled with pledges, organized under a general pledge issued by some countries — perhaps the Group of Seven, or a smaller group known as the Quad (the United States, Britain, Germany and France) — to which other countries will sign up, NATO-country diplomats said. The hope is to issue such a document with the pledges in Vilnius.

The document is meant to provide Ukraine with serious security commitments for the long run, even if it falls short of the security guarantee of full NATO membership. That means providing modern weapons and training that would ensure that Ukraine is so well armed that Russia would never try to invade it in the future.

Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the challenge would be to avoid “simply repeating the vague promises of the past. We have to counter the notion that if you have a frozen conflict, you are not welcome.”

There will be another major, if symbolic act: Ukraine’s relationship with NATO will be upgraded to “council status,” meaning that on key issues, Ukraine will be able to sit with the 31 member states as an equal, without Hungary, for example, able to block its participation. Russia once held that status until it annexed Crimea; giving it to Ukraine is a clear message to Putin.

The summit will also approve a new defense-spending pledge for the alliance, to replace the one agreed on in 2014, which aimed for allies to spend 2% of gross domestic product on the military, including 20% of that on equipment. The latest figures show that only 11 of the 31 members have reached that goal.

Still, NATO has no way to enforce those demands.

Also, and perhaps as important as anything else, the allies will give political approval to the first detailed war plans on how to defend all of NATO territory since the end of the Cold War. Those plans, drawn up by Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the American commander of allied forces in Europe, cover more than 4,000 pages and tell countries in specific terms what is required of them to defend themselves and their allies.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.