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Biden considering trip to Finland in July, TV reports

It is assumed that the purpose of the trip will be a summit of several countries, and not a bilateral meeting

MOSCOW, April 29. /TASS/. US President Joe Biden is mulling visiting Finland in July, NBC reported on Friday.

A potential visit to coincide with NATO’s July summit in Lithuania has been discussed for several months, but no final decision has yet been made, US officials told the TV channel. Any visit to the Nordic country, which became the bloc’s 31st member in early April, would be for a summit of multiple nations, not for a bilateral meeting, an official said.

The National Security Council at the White House declined to comment to NBC.

Sweden and Finland applied to join the North Atlantic Alliance in May 2022, but the accession process was blocked by Turkey, which demanded that Stockholm and Helsinki declare Kurdish organizations as terrorist organizations and extradite certain individuals that Ankara accused of terrorism or involvement in the 2016 coup attempt. In a bid to resolve these issues before the NATO summit in 2022, Turkey, Finland and Sweden signed a memorandum containing a list of specific steps that Ankara believed the two Nordic countries should take. The Turkish parliament approved a bill to ratify Finland’s accession to NATO on March 30. On April 4, Finland officially joined the military bloc.

NATO is scheduled to convene a summit in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, on July 11-12.

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United States Joseph Biden Finland

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