• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Greece says its new defence pact with France protects against third-party aggression

October 7, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

October 7, 2021

ATHENS (Reuters) -A new defence agreement between Greece and France will allow them to come to each other’s aid in the event of an external threat, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday, amid increased tensions with Turkey.

The strategic military and defence cooperation pact between the two NATO allies was clinched last month and includes an order for three French frigates worth about 3 billion euros.

Athens had already ordered some 24 Dassault-made Rafale fighter jets this year.

“For the first time it is clearly stipulated that there be military assistance in the event of a third party attacking one of the two states,” Mitsotakis told Greek lawmakers ahead of a parliamentary vote on Thursday to ratify the accord.

“And we all know who is threatening whom with a casus belli (cause for war) in the Mediterranean,” he added, in a clear reference to Turkey.

All NATO allies are required to come to the aid of a member state that suffers aggression, but the decades-old tensions between Athens and Ankara are complicated by the fact that Turkey is also a member of the Atlantic alliance.

Greece and Turkey are currently at odds over the extent of their continental shelves and their maritime boundaries, a fact that has hindered any expansion by Athens of its territorial waters to 12 miles (19 km) in the Aegean.

Turkey, which lies to Greece’s east, says such a move from Athens would be a casus belli. Some Greek islands lie less than 12 miles from Turkey’s western coast.

TURKEY’S REACTION TO THE PACT

The Athens-Paris pact angered Ankara, which said in a statement on Oct.1, that Greece’s “maximalist maritime jurisdiction area and national airspace claims” were in contravention of international law and that it would strengthen Turkey’s determination to protect its rights in the region.

“Greece’s policy of armament as well as isolation and alienation of Turkey, instead of cooperation, is a problematic policy, which will threaten regional peace and stability and undermine not only itself but also the EU, which Greece is a member of,” Turkish Foreign ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgiç said.

French officials have been at pains to say that the deal did not target Turkey and that it was fully in line with NATO.

“This is not an agreement that is directed against Turkey or anyone else, it is an agreement that is in line with our common goal, Greece and France, to strengthen European sovereignty, including in the Eastern Mediterranean, where we have crucial interests,” a French presidential official told reporters in a briefing on Sept. 28.

“So we would not understand if Turkey overreacts to an agreement that is not directed against them,” he said.

As well as the continental shelf issue, relations between Greece and Turkey have long been strained over other territorial issues in the Eastern Mediterranean, including air space, energy, the status of some Aegean islands, and the ethnically-split island of Cyprus.

The two countries re-launched exploratory contacts on their disputes earlier this year. Another round of bilateral discussions, which are informal, took place in Ankara on Oct. 6.

(Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas and Michele Kambas; Additional reporting by John Irish in ParisWriting by Michele KambasEditing by Gareth Jones and Frances Kerry)

Source Link Greece says its new defence pact with France protects against third-party aggression

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. UK says it is ready to send migrant boats back to France
  2. Explainer: Can Trump use executive privilege to block Jan. 6 attack probe?
  3. Peloton’s CEO John Foley on the changing face of connected fitness
  4. What Rent the Runway’s IPO filing says about the business of loaner garments

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version