Turkey continues to accuse the United States of waging an “economic war” amid the standoff between the NATO allies over an American pastor Washington calls a political hostage and Ankara a suspected terrorist and spy.

Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin repeated the claim on Aug. 22 that US sanctions on Turkey including stiffened trade tariffs, which have sent the Turkish currency into free-fall, are aimed at unraveling the country’s once vibrant economy. “The Trump administration is targeting a NATO ally as part of an economic war,” he told Reuters in a statement.

But as Turkey works to shift blame on the United States for the crisis, another narrative is taking hold: That the Trump administration’s sudden interest in Andrew Brunson, who has remained in detention since Oct. 2016, has mainly to do with vote-grabbing in the run-up the midterm elections that are due to be held in the United States on Nov. 6. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are using Brunson, a member of the conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church of America, to shore up the Republicans’ evangelical base.

Turkey’s foreign minister made the case most recently on Aug. 19 at a conference in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya. Mevlut Cavusoglu said he had told US officials, “It seems you have no interest in solving [our] problems, that you are acting out of concern for your own domestic political needs, that you are exploiting [the Brunson case] to this end and will continue to do so until the elections."