“If you sow wind you will reap storm, Greece will not forget it”. Ankara’s warning to Athens issued a few days ago by Foreign Minister Cavusoglu is renewed today by Ankara. The spark, the recent Greek military exercises in the eastern Mediterranean which took place just 84 kilometers from the Turkish coast, seen as a showdown by the Greek government, weapons that Ankara suspects arrive in Athens from the United States.
This is only the latest act of a dispute between Turkey and Greece, tensions that are inflaming the Mediterranean due to the long-standing dispute over Cyprus, but also the perennial disagreement on the division of the continental shelf, of maritime borders and airspace and finally of rights to exploit hydrocarbon resources in the Aegean and off Cyprus.
Today it is the Turkish president who announces that “new Tayfun ballistic missiles are in production”, they can reach Athens and hit it 561 kilometers away in 7 and a half minutes”, warned Erdogan, during a speech in Samsun, in the north of the country, opening a new worrying scenario for the already fragile balance in the Middle East.
“We have started producing our own missiles” and will strike Athens if “it doesn’t keep calm”. “We can go down unexpectedly one night, when the time comes”, sentences immortalized by the international press including the American Politico and Ekathimerini.
If Athens tries to “buy weapons left and right and from America to arm the islands, they cannot expect a country like Turkey to stand idly by”, added the “mediator” of the war in Ukraine, a skilled diplomatic weaver between West and East.
“It is unacceptable and universally condemnable that threats of a missile attack against Greece come from an allied country, a member of NATO”, replied the Greek Foreign Minister, Nikos Dendias, from Brussels where he is attending the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council of the Union and commenting on the words of the Turkish president accusing him of hiring “north korean attitudes” within the Atlantic Alliance”.
Taifun missiles, used by Moscow
The Tayfun, which means ‘typhoon’ in Turkish, is a short-range ballistic missile, also developed by other countries such as Russia and Germany, tested in October on the Black Sea.
Last week the Turkish government sent the fourth drilling vessel to the eastern Mediterranean. The Abdulhamid Han departed from the port of Mersin in southern Turkey and reached the lot that the Turks call Tasucu-1, not far from the waters of Cyprus. A ship capable of accommodating a crew of 200 people, equipped with latest generation technologies for the exploration of hydrocarbons, 239 meters long, with a tower of 112 meters and a width of 42 meters, can drill up to 12,200 meters deep.
