Turkey will be dropping its opposition to Sweden joining NATO, the alliance’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg announced last week. The news from NATO’s summit in Vilnius was heralded by Joe Biden, the new right-wing coalition government in Stockholm, and hawkish liberal media alike. The champagne, Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson averred, will start flowing soon enough, pending formal ratification. Yet not everyone will be celebrating.

As a NATO member, indeed one that commands the alliance’s second-largest army, Turkey wields a veto over other countries joining the US-led bloc. Since early 2022, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has wielded this privilege to hold up both Sweden and Finland’s accession. He has used this bargaining power to issue a laundry list of demands, primarily focused on making it easier for Turkey to continue its aggressive assaults on Kurdish rights, autonomy, and political organization — and even target the Kurdish diaspora in Europe.

Because of the Nordic countries’ concessions to Turkey over the last year, Kurdish exiles in Sweden and Finland have faced harassment, closed bank accounts, arrests, and deportation. Swedish Kurdish representative Hakan Cifci warns that allowing Erdoğan to dictate terms amounts to a tacit endorsement of his government’s “human rights violations, war crimes, cross-border operations, extrajudicial killings, the jailing of thousands of politicians, journalists, academics, activists, and the closure of hundreds of institutions and media networks.”