Türkiye is a neighbor unlike any other in its region, Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib said Friday during a joint press briefing with her Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias, who is in Athens on an official visit.
“It holds an important position in the Mediterranean,” Lahbib told reporters, alluding to Türkiye’s longstanding membership in NATO.
Expressing “sadness” over the strained relationship between fellow Mediterranean countries Greece and Türkiye, the Belgian minister said: “Dialogue and reducing the tension is the only way to resolving these kinds of bilateral problems."
She urged all parties involved to comply with international law and stressed that “conflict should be avoided.”
Broaching on the intensifying energy crisis prompted by the war in Ukraine, Lahbib assured Europe was “making a great effort” to cut off its reliance on Russian natural gas.
Meanwhile, Dendias maintained that the two ministers discussed matters like cooperation, commercial ties, the energy crisis and regional developments between their countries in line with NATO, the EU, and the U.N. frameworks in the meeting.
Türkiye and Greece are at odds over several issues, including competing claims to jurisdiction in the Eastern Mediterranean, overlapping claims over their continental shelves, maritime boundaries, airspace, energy, the ethnically split island of Cyprus, the status of the islands in the Aegean Sea and migrants.
As Athens and Ankara swap blows over offshore rights and natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea, Europe is seeking alternative energy sources because of the need to bring natural gas from Russia to the bloc amid the war the Kremlin is waging on Ukraine.
Over the past year, Greece, which plans to turn its port of Alexandroupolis near the Turkish border into an energy hub receiving liquefied natural gas shipments, has been working to speed up its hydrocarbon drilling and gas exploration in the Aegean to the same end of ensuring self-sufficiency and reducing dependency on Russian energy.
In the meantime, Ankara, connected to Russia by one of the largest gas pipeline systems the TurkStream, has floated the idea of turning Türkiye into a new supply hub with the Kremlin.
