Hungary will surely give its backing: Orban

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday that the parliament is set to ratify NATO membership for Finland and Sweden early next year.

Orban told a briefing after a meeting of the Visegrad Group in Slovakia that his government had already decided that Hungary would support Finland's and Sweden's NATO accession and the parliament would set this item on its agenda at its first session next year.

"Hungary will surely give its backing to their accession, after the government had done, also parliament will do so," Orban said.

The Hungarian parliament is expected to reconvene in mid February.

Hungary and Turkey are the only NATO members who have not yet given green light.

Turkish officials have repeatedly stated that they will clear the accession only when their conditions, included in a trilateral deal in June on the sidelines a NATO summit, have been fulfilled.

In the context of the deal, Turkey agreed to ratify Sweden's and Finland's accession provided that the two governments crackdown on Kurdish activists allegedly affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and hand them over to Turkey, that they do not support the Kurdish militia People's Defense Units (YPG) in Northern Syria, and that Stockholm lifts arms embargoes imposed on Turkey following the latter's invasion of Syrian territories in 2019.