Typical Greece. The right hand does not know what the left one does. Two whole hours after the news of the dialogue freezing was circulating in all media, the office of the Prime Minister dismissed the reports saying that talks on “Confidence Building Measures” will continued as planned.
Sources of the PM’s office told media that “the dialogue with Turkey regarding the Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) will continue as normal and that military technical discussions between Greece and Turkey will normally take place in December.”
The same sources said that “the confusion was triggered when information coming from sources in the Ministry of National Defense referred to the suspension of the CBMs.”
KTG reported earlier:
Greece has decided to freeze the dialogue with Turkey on military Confidence Building Measures in the Aegean on Tuesday. Athens dropped the diplomatic bombshell, 24 hours before the meeting between Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, with Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Wednesday afternoon in London.
Citing sources form the Greek Defense Ministry, daily katimerini reports that the talks on CBM have been suspended until a later date. The talks were scheduled to start later in December.
The dialogue freezing follows the latest initiatives by Turkey, that is to sign a “maritime boundaries” agreement with Libya and to publish maps aiming at creating maritime zones in the East Mediterranean Sea, with the Turkish Foreign Ministry to claim that the Greek islands “cannot generate maritime jurisdiction areas.”
The Greek Ministry of Defense decided that the dialogue on Confidence Building Measures was “pointless.”
The freezing will be in effect when the Turkish side returns to the dialogue in a creative way, the Ministry sources said.
Kathimerni notes that Athens was skeptical about the CBM for weeks as Ankara attempted to include issues like the Migration in the bilateral talks.
