Türkiye said Saturday it was "not in a position" to ratify Sweden's NATO membership. "We are not in a position to send a (ratification) law to the parliament," President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalin told reporters.
Sweden and its Nordic neighbour Finland dropped decades of military non-alignment and applied to join the Western defence alliance in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year.
Türkiye and Hungary remain the only NATO members to have still not ratified the bids by votes in parliament.
Ankara argues that Sweden, in particular, has failed to fulfil a series of commitments both countries made at a NATO summit in June.
Erdoğan then lifted his objections to their applications in return for pledges to crack down on YPG/PKK and FETO terror groups that Ankara views as "terrorists".
"It really depends on how fast they move and how wide and deep they move on these issues," Ibrahim Kalin said in a statement.
"What they're telling us is the new laws will be fully effective and completed by June, but maybe there are some things they can do before," Kalin said.
"In principle we would like to see them (Sweden and Finland) in NATO," Kalin told foreign journalists in Istanbul. "What they say is that they need a little bit more time. We told them 'You have to meet these conditions,' meaning that they have to send a serious message to the PKK."
Ankara recognizes the Swedish and Finnish commitment to changing anti-terror laws in accordance with an agreement signed between the three countries at last June's NATO summit, he added.
"Stockholm is fully committed to implementing the agreement that was signed last year in Madrid, but the country needs six more months to write new laws that would allow the judicial system to implement the new definitions of terrorism."
"We believe in this process and we want to make progress, but if these incidents continue, it's not going to look good on them and it will certainly affect the process — it will slow down progress," he said.
Kalin also spoke about the war in Ukraine, and Türkiye's rapprochement with Syria.
He defended Ankara's decision not to join Western sanctions on Russia, pointing to the grain deal and prisoner exchanges as successes for its role as an intermediary.
Such "localized moments of de-escalation" would help bring an end to the war. "If the goal (of sanctions) was to change Russian behavior and end the war, I don't think that's been achieved," he said.
Referring to talks to normalize relations between Ankara and Damascus, Kalin said the initial meeting between the neighbors' defense ministers at the end of December could be extended, with foreign ministers possibly meeting in February.
"We will see how these meetings go, what kind of outcomes they produce and then, depending on that, we will talk about a possible meeting at the level of the president," he said.
