Pushbacks in Greece

The Hellenic Coast Guard rescued 13 migrants and arrested their trafficker off the eastern Aegean island of Samos on Tuesday morning.

According to the Coast Guard, a rescue boat spotted and immobilized an inflatable dinghy in the sea area of Prasou, northeast of Samos.

Τhe Hellenic Coast Guard rescued 26 migrants and arrested five of them (aged 23, 22, 23, 21 and 23) in the sea region south of Agrilia on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos on Monday morning.

According to the Coast Guard, one of its vessels conducting a surveillance patrol noticed an inflatable dinghy with passengers within Turkish territorial waters.

The Greek Coast Guard rescued 53 migrants from an inflatable boat located off the coast of Lesvos in the eastern Aegean on Friday.

The Coast Guard said six of the people on the boat removed the engine and made holes in the dinghy when they saw the patrol vessel approaching.

Greece should not be burdened with the task of managing migration for the European Union, or be accused of not saving people at sea, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday, a month after a deadly shipwreck.

Greece's new minister for migration said Monday he would consider it "unthinkable" for the European Union to pull out its border protection force from the country, and promised to address a growing list of international grievances over dealing with migrants.

The Turkish Coast Guard has rescued 84 irregular migrants pushed back by Greek authorities off the northwestern province of Çanakkale.

The teams initiated an operation after receiving information that a group of irregular migrants was drifting off Çanakkale's Ayvacık district.

The European Union's border agency is seeking "clarifications and information" from Greece's coast guard on two alleged cases of migrants who crossed by boat being illegally deported back to Turkey, a European official said Friday.

The Turkish Coast Guard has rescued 14 irregular migrants pushed back by Greek authorities off the northwestern province of Çanakkale.

The teams took action upon receiving information that a group of irregular migrants was drifting off Çanakkale's Ayvacık district.

On November 17 last year, when Hervé Yves Caniard entered the 14-floor conference room of the European Union border agency Frontex in Warsaw, European newspapers were flooded with stories of refugees a few hundreds kilometres away, braving the cold at the Belarusian border with Poland.

Turkish Coast Guard teams have saved a total of 186 irregular migrants that were pushed back to Turkish waters by Greece in two separate operations conducted in the İzmir and Muğla provinces.