Sweden is confident that Turkey will approve its application to join the NATO military alliance, but cannot fulfil all the conditions Ankara has set for its support, Sweden’s prime minister said on Sunday.

“Turkey both confirms that we have done what we said we would do, but they also say that they want things that we cannot or do not want to give them,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told a defence think-tank conference in Sweden.

Finland and Sweden signed a three-way agreement with Turkey in 2022 aimed at overcoming Ankara’s objections to their membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

They applied in May to join NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Turkey objected and accused the countries of harbouring militants, including from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party

One sticking point has been extraditions of people Turkey regards as terrorists. Ankara expressed disappointment with a decision late last year from Sweden’s top court to stop a request to extradite a journalist with alleged links to Islamic scholar Fetullah Gulen, blamed by Turkey for an attempted coup.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday it had killed more than 600 Ukrainian servicemen in a massive rocket strike on two buildings in eastern Ukraine temporarily housing Ukrainian forces.

Reuters could not immediately verify the defence ministry’s assertion. There was no immediate comment on the Russian claim from Ukraine, though the mayor of Kramatorsk, the eastern Ukrainian town Russia said it had targeted, said earlier on Sunday on Facebook that nobody had been killed in an attack on various buildings in the city.

Russia’s defence ministry said the strike on the buildings in Kramatorsk was revenge for a deadly Ukrainian attack earlier this year on a Russian barracks in Makiivka in part of the Donetsk region controlled by Moscow’s forces in which at least 89 servicemen were killed.

The ministry said in a statement that it had used what it called reliable intelligence to target the Ukrainian troops. It said more than 700 Ukrainian troops had been housed in one hostel and more than 600 in another.

“As a result of a massive missile strike on these temporary deployment points of Ukrainian army units, more than 600 Ukrainian servicemen were destroyed,” the defence ministry said.

If true, it would be the single largest loss of Ukrainian troops since Russia invaded on Feb. 24 last year.

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An American-Ukrainian reports on what he encountered in Ukraine this Christmas.