Mitsotakis and Erdogan meet for the first time since tensions escalated

The Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are holding a long-awaited meeting on Monday on the sidelines of the NATO summit after more than a year of disagreements between their countries.

Although Mitsotakis has assured that he is predisposed to "a positive agenda", he explained that it will be developed "in a gradual, proportional and reversible way", paraphrasing the conclusions of the European Council last March in which the situation with Turkey was dealt with.

The prime minister arrives at the meeting cautiously and, although he has stated that he expects a "calmer" summer, the challenges continued today with a clash between the Turkish and Greek Coast Guards, which according to the latter ended with a Greek patrol boat slightly damaged, but no injuries.

In an interview with France 24 this morning, Mitsotakis stressed the importance of resolving the differences between Athens and Ankara in a "peaceful" manner as members of the Atlantic Alliance and that, in order to avoid further escalation, it is necessary to "agree on a framework of reference" that complies with international law.

The meeting in Brussels will be the first in which Erdogan and Mitsotakis will be entirely alone, although they have met twice before the escalation of tension that began last summer.

Their first meeting was in September 2019, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, shortly after Mitsotakis won the election. The second, like this Monday's, took place on the sidelines of a NATO summit in London in December of the same year.

Just a couple of months later, bilateral relations between Greece and Turkey began to deteriorate with Ankara opening its land border, triggering a crisis with thousands of migrants trying to cross into Europe being repressed by Greek police forces

Following this clash with migration in the centre and the arrival of the pandemic, Turkey suspended the repatriation of migrants from the Greek Aegean islands, one of the demands Athens made of it as a sign of goodwill.

However, it was in the summer that tensions flared after Ankara sent a seismic vessel to explore oil and gas fields in areas of the Mediterranean Sea that both countries consider to be under their jurisdiction.