Conscious uncoupling: Could Finland break with Sweden on NATO membership?

NATO leaders are meeting later this month in Madrid, with the war in Ukraine dominating their agenda. There's also the issue of membership applications from Finland and Sweden to consider - a process that was expected to be straightforward for the military alliance but which has stalled after Turkey raised objections. 

The issues flagged up by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan include perceived support by Stockholm and Helsinki for Kurdish groups that Ankara says are security threats. 

Those concerns are more focussed on Sweden, with its sizeable Kurdish diaspora, and to a lesser extent Finland. 

So should the Finns consider uncoupling their NATO membership bid from Sweden's, if there could be any delays in the process?

That's a question one of Finland's most prominent security policy researchers has raised. 

"Things can change very quickly in just six months as we have seen," says Charly Salonius-Pasternak, from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. 

"For this reason, I thought it particularly unwise to now say we will do this hand in hand. Certainly, Finnish politicians have said Finland and Sweden will keep each other appraised and that there would be no surprises... but it is odd to want to specifically link the two applications like this," he tells Euronews. 

There has certainly been a disconnect in the messaging from Finland's senior political leadership in recent weeks around this subject. 

Both President Sauli Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin have said that Finland and Sweden would continue their application process in lockstep.  

However, that seems to be a contradiction to previous Finnish positions that the Nordic nation needs to make sovereign decisions based on an evaluation of its own