Croatian President Zoran Milanovic plans to instruct Ambassador Mario Nobilo, the country’s permanent representative to NATO, to block the accession of Finland and Sweden to the decades-old military alliance, he said Wednesday.
Refusing consent would turn the international community’s attention to problems facing ethnic Croats in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milanovic told reporters. Under the current election laws, Croat representatives tend to get elected with the votes of Bosnian Muslims, also known as Bosniaks. Zagreb is pushing to revise this.
“I have said before, Croats in Bosnia are more important to me than the entire Russian-Finnish border,” Milanovic said.