Turkish AKP government backs the accession of Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Macedonia to NATO, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Monday at a joint press conference with the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in Ankara.
"We expect the reconfirmation of enlargement policy at [upcoming NATO] summit. Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia … Turkey supports their inclusion and is for the enlargement of NATO," Çavuşoğlu said.
The next summit of the alliance will take place on July 11-12 in Brussels.
Greece has long been blocking accession of Macedonia, temporarily referred to by Athens as Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), to NATO and to the European Union over the lack of agreement on the republic’s official name.
NATO has been significantly increasing its presence in Eastern Europe after the eruption of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, using the alleged Russian interference in Ukrainian internal affairs as a pretext.
