Mitsotakis warns Ankara not to test its territorial claims on the ground

Amidst a barrage of Turkish threats and claims of sovereignty over a series of Greek islets of the eastern Aegean by the Turkish defence ministry, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis today warned Ankara not to even think of testing its territorial claims on the ground.

“I openly encourage Turkey not to translate this [its escalation of bellicose rhetoric and territorial claims] into tension on the ground. Greece has proven that it is ready to defend its sovereignty and its sovereign rights,” Mitsotakis today told a health conference organised by ygeiamou.gr today.

Mitsotakis appeared convinced that the two countries are nowhere near the level of tension that led them to the brink of a military clash in the Eastern Mediterranean in August, 2020.

The PM enraged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when in his 17 May address to a Joint Session of the US Congress he urged the legislature indirectly not to approve a planned sale of 40 F-16 fighter planes to Ankara, essentially proposing an arms embargo on Turkey.

Erdogan complained that at their cordial 13 March talks in Istanbul, the two leaders agreed not to involve third countries in their bilateral disagreements, and that Mitsotakis violated that understanding.

In his remarks today, Mitsotakis underlined that Turkey’s escalation of tensions with Greece further complicates the turbulence caused by the Russo-Ukrainian war.

It also further undermines NATO’s cohesion at a time that Ankara is already blocking the membership applications of Sweden and Finland in an apparent bid to secure concessions from the US, both in terms of its planned invasion of Syria and arms procurement, as many analysts suggest.

Greece ready for talks without provocations

Although after the PM’s speech to Congress Erdogan vowed never to speak to Mitsotakis again and declared that for him the Greek prime minister “no longer exists”, Mitsotakis said that Greece is always open for talks as long as the two sides do not provoke each other.

The PM said that Turkey did not keep its commitment to refrain from provocations and that Ankara’s dispute of Greece’s sovereignty over its islands due to the fact that they are defensively armed is outlandish.

He noted that Erdogan had again in the past vowed to cut off dialogue with him after Ankara unsuccessfully attempted, in February, 2020, to push thousands of refugees and migrants into Greece at the Evros Greek-Turkish border region, where a fence has now been erected by Greece, but that talks later resumed.

“I expect that at some point we will talk, because we should talk. First of all, I am not the one who will say we are not talking. At the same time, we shall defend Greek positions with the absolute certitude that we have [international] law on our side,” Mitsotakis said.

“Turkey’s rhetoric will lead nowhere,” the PM concluded.