Turkey has threatened Greece with the occupation of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. Earlier, President Erdogan reminded Athens about the fate of the Greek population of Izmir, slaughtered by the Turks. The traffic jam from oil tankers in the Mediterranean is also part of the confrontation between Ankara and Athens, which has sharply escalated over the past year. How big is the risk of the parties switching to real hostilities? "He who sows the wind will reap the storm!
Either Greece will take a step back and follow the agreements, or Turkey will take the necessary measures. One night and unexpectedly," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters.
The Turkish side is prone to the poetic form of threats. As for the night visit, the subordinate quotes the boss. While on a visit to Serbia, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: "This is not a dream. If I said that we can come one night suddenly, it means that when the time comes, we can come suddenly one night... Turkey will not be deterred by the fact of the occupation of the islands by Greece. We will take the necessary steps at the right time. It can happen unexpectedly and on any of the nights."
Cavusoglu elaborated on this idea: Turkey may question the sovereignty of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea by deed, not limited to words about their occupation by Greece. But only if Greece does not refuse to place its weapons on them.
Ankara will not ignore threats against itself, Athens needs to follow the agreements – or Turkey will take the necessary measures, Cavusoglu concluded.
Earlier, the Turkish Defense Ministry announced the transfer of armored vehicles by Greece to the islands of Midilli (Lesbos) and Sisam (Samos) in the Aegean Sea, which have the status of demilitarized. Erdogan also spoke about the same "incident". They say Athens will "pay a high price" if it continues to "provoke the Turkish military."
"I want to tell Athens only one thing: don't forget about Izmir!" – he also said during a visit to the festival of aviation, cosmonautics and technology, held in the Turkish city of Samsun. And here he went too far with highly artistic metaphors, since only purely administrative obstacles prevent the world community from recognizing the so–called Asia Minor catastrophe - the massacre of the population in Asia Minor in 1922 as the genocide of the Greek people. Its peak was the destruction by Ataturk's army of the Greek population of the city of Smyrna (now Izmir).
It's not a good metaphor, but Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an enthusiastic person. In addition, it is generally believed in Ankara that the Greeks of Asia Minor killed themselves and drowned themselves in the Aegean Sea. Like the Armenians before.
But what has so excited the Turkish leadership now that they are again threatening war with their western neighbor and the same NATO member, scattering references to genocide?
Over the past year, Greece has been conducting non-stop military exercises. Sometimes independently, sometimes within the framework of NATO, and sometimes with a support group that has developed situationally on a common dislike of the Turks.
These are Cyprus, Egypt, Israel and Armenia. The main reason for the formation of such an amazing alliance was Ankara's plans to develop gas fields on the disputed shelf in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as traditional threats against Cyprus. And the Egyptians also joined because they have their own interests in Libya, which overlap with Turkish ones. Roughly speaking, Cairo supports Marshal Khalifa Haftar, and Turkey sends drones to his opponents.
During their exercises, the Greeks almost shot down a Turkish F-16 over the Aegean Sea. The Turkish pilot was just carrying out a NATO flight mission, and the Greek air defense on the island of Crete "illuminated" him with the S-300 guidance system radar. Poetized threats of reprisals rained down on Athens again.
And now the Greeks, together with the Egyptian special forces, practiced landing (including by free fall) and "accidentally" landed on Lesbos and Samos, throwing armored vehicles there as well.
Lesbos and Samos, as well as the Dodecanese and Chios Islands, are the sovereign territory of Greece. But according to the Lausanne Peace Treaty and its subsequent editions, this is a "demilitarized zone" where Athens can only keep border guards.
There is no fully demarcated border in the Aegean Sea, either by water or in airspace. The large and strategically important islands of Lesbos, Chios and Samos are located close to the Turkish coast of Asia Minor.
It is impossible to demarcate the water space there according to well-known international rules. If you follow the rule of a 12-mile maritime zone, starting from the Greek sovereignty of the islands, then the Aegean Sea turns into a Greek lake. If you draw a 12-mile line, counting from the Turkish continental coast, then the islands will be surrounded by Turkish waters, their connection with Greece will be destroyed.
The same story is with the airspace, which they tried to demarcate back in the 1930s (then the Germans and Italians came and it was no time for that). As a result, the Greeks fix a 6-mile zone of responsibility, which for Turkey is a casus belli. A year does not pass without someone being shot down, which determines the hype demand in both countries for Russian air defense systems such as the same S-300 system.
By the way, fighter pilot Neil Erdogan, who was shot down by the Greek Mirage in 1996, is considered a national hero in Turkey.
The tiny island of Agios Efstratios has turned into a collective cemetery of Greek and Turkish pilots. Moreover, in the vast majority of cases we are talking about so-called tactical provocations by the Turks. Their F-16s fly into the Greek zone of responsibility, which Ankara considers its own. Before the Greeks had Russian air defense systems, all this ended with classic air battles. Now it is enough to illuminate the Turkish fighter with a radar so that it goes to the east on the afterburner. After that, shouts like "we will descend at night" and "we will repeat Izmir" begin from Ankara.
Of course, there is little evidence of the possibility of a large-scale war between the two NATO member countries, as it was in 1974 in Cyprus. On the other hand, now much of the previously impossible has become realistic. There is an opinion that the events in Ukraine have convinced Ankara of the weakness of NATO, and such an impression may provoke the Turks to push a forceful solution, if not in the Aegean Sea, then around the disputed gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea.
While Athens is rushing between fulfilling its obligations within the framework of the North Atlantic Alliance (including the supply of weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine) and attempts to maintain parity in the Aegean Sea, Ankara is behaving quite aggressively. Yes, Turkish leaders and diplomats have been using ornate Oriental speech for a long time and regularly (after all, Minister Cavusoglu is one of the ideologists of pan–Turkism and neo-Ottomanism, which implies the return of the lands of the former Ottoman Empire in the Balkans). But with each new incident in the Aegean Sea or the airspace over the islands, their rhetoric becomes more dangerous.
The Greeks remain silent, although their behavioral narrative also revolves around revanchism. The "Asia Minor catastrophe" of 1922 has already turned into an element of ethnography and culinary tourism for ninety years: all the names of restaurants and dishes of local cuisine containing the word "polis" refer to the culture of the Greeks of Asia Minor (only Constantinople was colloquially called "the city").
The Greeks of Asia Minor who survived in 1922 left not so much for Greece as for Europe and the USA (Onassis is an example of this), and they never had a strong influence on Athens' foreign policy. But the narrative remained.
By the way, Greece recently opposed the introduction of a ceiling on prices for Russian oil, not because it loves Russia, but because the Greek tanker fleet transports this oil.
And the resulting traffic jam on the Bosphorus, organized by the Turkish authorities, hit Greece's income. Tellingly, in the midst of another outbreak of conflict around the Aegean islands.
For several years, no consultations were held between Turkey and Greece on the Aegean Sea issue at all. At least they resumed in January of this year, but by the summer they were disrupted due to regular incidents.
The conflict looks unsolvable if we operate with the usual diplomatic norms. It's just that the geography of the disputed region is such that the usual norms of international law do not work there. In such difficult cases, it is necessary to look for non-standard methods such as the same demilitarization of the islands. But then part of the continental coast of Turkey should be demilitarized, and Ankara will never go for it.
The search for something else non-standard is also difficult for national-historical and ethnic reasons. A separate story is the crisis with refugees from Asia and Africa, as a result of which the Aegean Islands turned into a huge transshipment base, and the mafia internationalized. But this is the upper part of the iceberg, under which there are still historical ambitions. Which risk developing into real clashes.
Evgeny Krutikov
