The arrival of 41 military vehicles donated by the US to the disputed islands of Lesbos and Samos reignites tensions between Athens and Ankara
Turkey and Greece, Greece and Turkey raise the tone of their dialectical war around one of the historical fronts opened between them: the Aegean islands. The official Anadolu agency reported the arrival of 41 military vehicles donated by the US to Lesbos and Samos, 15 and 1.3 kilometers from the Turkish coast, and showed the images captured from their drones. Ankara filed a formal complaint with the Americans and the Foreign Ministry urgently summoned the Greek ambassador to ask him to put an end to what they consider to be the violation of the agreement signed between the parties that determines that these islands should be a demilitarized zone.
The arrival of these armored vehicles on islands in dispute since World War I is one more chapter in the long list of historical disagreements between Ankara and Athens, which also includes the delimitation of airspace, maritime borders, hydrocarbon resources in the Mediterranean or the division of Cyprus.
Turkey accuses the neighboring country of “occupying” some islands that are Greek territory, but in which Athens cannot deploy soldiers, according to international law. Ankara appeals to the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 and the Paris Treaty of 1947 to defend that there can be no military presence on the islands, so the arrival of these armored vehicles would be prohibited. Greece, which despite its financial problems leads spending on weapons within NATO, defends that “our borders are blue, not gray and the strengthening of the Armed Forces is a priority”, in the words of the Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis . From the Hellenic side they denounce the Turkish “illegal military maneuvers” on their borders.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan went a step further and launched the threat of a possible veiled invasion. “We could come one of these nights,” declared the president. The neighbor and ally in NATO responded that they are ready to defend their sovereignty. To the list of misunderstandings of the last month we must add that a Hellenic patrol boat opened fire on a Turkish ship in what Ankara considers international waters. From the Ministry of Defense in Athens they denounced that, only on September 14, Turkish fighters and drones violated their airspace 110 times.
And in the midst of the escalation of tension between the two governments, the leader of the opposition in Turkey, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, made an electoral reading of the situation and wrote on Twitter that «Mitsotakis and Erdogan have one thing in common: their popularity. does not stop falling. That is why the two populists are playing the war card. They don’t know how else to come back!” The two leaders are playing for their position at the polls in the coming months and this type of situation serves to overshadow internal problems, the list of which is long in both nations.
Washington Deployment
To further complicate the situation, Turkey has sounded the alarm over the establishment of ten US bases on Greek soil in recent months. Washington assures that these are logistics centers to transfer weapons to Ukraine and stop any possible security threat from Moscow. Before the query made on this issue by Erdogan, “they answer us that it is a measure against Russia, but we do not believe it,” declared the president.
Speaking to the Turkish channel TRT, the military analyst and former Army officer, Ulas Pehlivan, stressed that “although many Western analysts tend to accept Washington’s position that expanding its presence in Greece is done to counter a possible Russian threat and strengthen NATO solidarity, it also simultaneously serves as an indirect support to the Greek foreign policy at odds with Turkey in the Aegean Sea.
With the war in Ukraine in the background, this direct confrontation between neighbors in the Aegean waters remains in the background, but both the European Union and NATO have rushed to calm all parties to prevent the opening of a new front.
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