Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Turkey will no longer engage in high-level discussions with Greece, despite escalating tensions between the two longstanding adversaries.
Following a five-year hiatus, Ankara and Athens started talks last year to resolve tensions over a variety of topics, including mineral development in the eastern Mediterranean and competing claims in the Aegean Sea.
“We broke off our high-level strategy council meetings with Greece,” Erdogan told a meeting of his party’s lawmakers in Ankara, adding: “Don’t you learn any lessons from history? Don’t try to dance with Turkey.”
The discussions had made little progress, but they were an opportunity for the two countries to voice their complaints without resorting to an armed confrontation, as happened just two years before.
Erdogan’s shift in the discussions appeared to be spurred last week when he expressed his anger with statements made by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis during a visit to the United States.
Read More: Turkey says Nordics must change laws if needed to meet its NATO demands
After accusing Mitsotakis of attempting to hinder Turkey’s procurement of F-16 fighter jets, Erdogan declared Mitsotakis “no longer existed” for him.
Erdogan also addressed Turkey’s opposition to Sweden and Finland becoming NATO members. Ankara has claimed that the Nordic countries hide terror suspects and arm a Syrian organization it believes is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has conducted a 38-year war within Turkey.
“NATO is a security organization, not a support organization for terrorist organizations,” he said.
The US and EU have categorized the PKK as a terror group. However, its Syrian wing, the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, has played a leading role in the US-led fight against the Daesh group.
Erdogan said those who tried to legitimize the PKK with “letter tricks” were “deceiving themselves, not us.”
The president added that Turkey would not change its stance on the Swedish and Finnish NATO application without seeing “binding documents” demonstrating a hardened approach to those Ankara considers terrorists.
For the latest International News Follow BOL News on Google News. Read more on Latest International News on oldsite.bolnews.com
