Recep Tayyip Erdogan has once again threatened Greece, in a thinly veiled way. The Turkish president said this Sunday that "they are afraid that Tayfun will hit Athens and they are right, because if they don't calm down, he will." This ballistic missile made by the Turkish state company Roketsan has a range of more than 500 kilometers and was tested a couple of months ago over the Black Sea.
The Turkish head of state and government made the statements at a youth conference, in his coastal fiefdom of Samsun. "If you try to send things you buy from the United States to the islands, a country like Turkey cannot look the other way," he added.
It is not clear what US weaponry Erdogan is referring to, but the right-wing government of Kiriakos Mitsotakis has reopened its country wide open to Pentagon influence, taking advantage of tensions between Washington and Ankara. In addition to acquiring heavy weapons, Athens reportedly obtained the green light from the United States for the purchase of twenty F-35 fighter-bombers, banned from Turkey.
Erdogan already provoked Greece a month ago by saying that his capital was within the radius of action of the prototypes of the new Tayfun missiles (typhoon, in Turkish). A month earlier, he had used the expression "we will show up any night", a veiled threat about a repeat of something resembling the Turkish landing and occupation of northern Cyprus in 1974.
It should be remembered that the First World War resulted in the loss by Constantinople of practically all the Ottoman island domains. Shortly after, General Mustafa Kemal, without a navy, had to admit the cession of the islands, which on the other hand, had a majority, if not overwhelming, Greek population.
To this we must add that the islands of the Dodecanese, such as Rhodes - which remained under Fascist Italy in the interwar period - also later passed into Greek hands. In the case of the tiny island of Kastelorizo, substantially diminishing Turkish territorial waters, in an Eastern Mediterranean now heated by gas prospecting.
The Turkish president, on the other hand, spoke by telephone this Sunday with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, with the aim, according to him, that the safe maritime corridor for Ukrainian grain is also opened to other goods.
Erdogan, who has been in power for twenty years, has declared in recent days that the next elections, to be held before June, "will be the last" in which he will fight as a candidate, before handing over the baton "to the youth".
