Greek President: Support for dialogue with Turkey, military ready at any moment

Amidst Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent barrage of invective against Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, with whom he refuses to speak, President Katerina Sakellaropoulou reached out to Turkey for a restart of an earnest dialogue based on international law.

“Greece, as it has proven, has diachronically supported dialogue and good neighbourly relations, always based on respect for the principles of international law. That presupposes, however, that those principles are respected by both sides,” she said.

“Greece is maintaining its composure. At the same time, it is absolutely prepared, at any moment, to defend its sovereignty and sovereign rights regarding which, as an independent and sovereign state, it naturally will accept no dispute,” Sakellaropoulou said at a joint press conference in Vilnius with the president of Lithuania, a fellow NATO member-state, Gitanas Nausėda.

She was responding to a journalist’s question regarding Turkey’s continual and escalating disputing of Greece’s borders.

Erdogan has escalated verbal attacks on Mitsotakis because the PM asked a Joint Session of the US Congress to block arms sales to Turkey. He claimed the Greek PM had pledged to him not to involve third countries in bilateral affairs, but Athens has all along internationalised all Turkish provocations, always briefing the EU, NATO, and the UN.

Turkey lays claim to Greek islets, says Greek officials need permission to visit

More ominously, having disputed Greek sovereignty over a series of Eastern Aegean islands unless it demilitarises them, Ankara now has said that Greek ministers and officials must request its permission in order to visit Greek islands that have not been ceded to Athens by name in the Treaty of Lausanne or the Treaty of Paris. On those grounds, a Turkish Vice-Admiral went as far as to list a series of Greek islets that he claimed belong to Turkey [as the successor-state to the Ottoman Empire].

‘Turkey must prove its trustworthiness as an interlocutor, NATO ally’

“Turkey does not always demonstrate its trustworthiness. It should, therefore, at every opportunity, prove that it is not what we would call “a troublemaker” that constantly stirs problems in Southeastern Europe, and that it is a trustworthy NATO ally. In any event, we certainly support dialogue, even in this period in which we have been hearing inflammatory rhetoric from Turkish authorities, including the president, ministers, and other officials,” the Greek president underlined.

Sakellaropoulou also stressed that Greece has approved imposing all EU and NATO sanctions packages against Russia, and Turkey has imposed none.

Nausėda calls on Turkey to ‘behave as NATO ally’

The Lithuanian president dismissed the prospect of EU sanctions against Turkey due to its threats to Greece’s sovereignty, and said “there is an opportunity to resolve this conflict with peaceful means”.

However, he further noted that, “Any escalation of conflict harms NATO and weakens it as an alliance, as a shield of collective security. That is why at some point I was exceptionally glad when it seemed that discussions between Greece and Turkey had normalised. Now, however, I am concerned, because I see there is an escalation of, if you will, inflammatory rhetoric and I believe we must behave as Nato allies, and even now resolve conflicts with peaceful means,” he said, effectively echoing Sakellaropoulou’s remarks.