Athens closely monitors Ankara’s moves as Turkish drill ship heads toward Eastern Mediterranean

Though Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has repeatedly stated that he does not expect the sort of tensions that nearly led Greece and Turkey to a naval clash when the Turkish "Oruc Reis" drill ship entered Greece's territorial waters in August, 2020, the recent geopolitical tectonic shifts triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which lends a new impetus to Ankara's neo-Ottoman expansionist designs, stressed by the frequent references of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to a "Blue Homeland", that includes large portions of the maritime jurisdictions of Greece and Cyprus, leaves little room for complacency.

Erdogan, in speaking today of Turkey's new, ultra-modern drill ship (its fourth) "Abdulhamid Han" setting sail tomorrow from the port of Taşucu, Mersin, declared that Ankara will permit "no [hydrocarbons] deals in its area of jurisdiction."

While Greek defence ministry and foreign ministry officials have for weeks been studying various scenarios about where the ship will be sent and possibly drill and all possible deterrent actions, analysts suggest that the ship's mission has a strong nationalist propagandistic dimension, as regards both domestic political consumption and Ankara's apparent decision to push the envelope on the geopolitical chessboard in the Eastern Mediterranean.

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Turkish propaganda and preoccupation of the Greek press

For Ankara, the fact that the drill ship's mission has for weeks stirred intense concerns and preoccupied the Greek press, which has run the story very prominently, is indicative of the success of the propaganda dimension of the...

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