Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will use his address to the UN General Assembly Thursday to project a message of consistency, international standing and credibility, emphasizing Greece’s commitment to dialogue, diplomacy, international law and the UN Charter, while stressing the need to safeguard multilateralism in a highly unstable and uncertain international environment.
In his address to the UN General Assembly, the prime minister is expected to focus on six key areas while also highlighting the challenges facing Greece as tensions with Turkey rise, amid the expected introduction of Turkish legislation concerning the country’s “Blue Homeland” doctrine.
On Greek-Turkish relations and what Greece describes as Turkish violations in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, following the designation of what Athens considers illegal Turkish marine parks, Mitsotakis is expected to convey through the UN that Greece seeks stability, peace and good-neighborly relations without making concessions on matters of sovereignty and sovereign rights. Greece, he is expected to stress, remains open to dialogue, but that dialogue must be based on international law.
Mitsotakis also reiterated Wednesday, at an event for the Greek diaspora, that Greece threatens no one but is not threatened itself, making clear that the country will continue strengthening its defenses. This, he has emphasized in the past, does not mean Greece is acting with any third party as its target, an argument Turkey frequently invokes in connection with Greece’s defense cooperation with France and Israel.
The Greek side has already made clear that the Greece-Cyprus electricity interconnection project, a European initiative that is also of interest to the United States, will be completed soon, despite Turkish attempts to obstruct it on the ground and periodic threats against the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI) made by Turkish officials.
The same will apply to the creation of two national marine parks in the Ionian and Aegean seas, which Mitsotakis referred to in New York during his participation in an event hosted by the global “Ocean Eye” alliance. Ankara has openly opposed the initiative, despite the fact that the protected marine areas are located within Greece’s territorial waters.
The Cyprus issue will also be high on the Greek agenda, both in the prime minister’s address to the General Assembly and during his meetings in New York. Before his speech, Mitsotakis is scheduled to meet with UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who during his term, which ends at the end of 2026, has made a major effort to restart negotiations based on the agreed UN framework.
Meanwhile, in his speech on Wednesday, Nikos Christodoulides directly accused Recep Tayyip Erdogan of “maximum hypocrisy,” stressing that Turkey cannot speak publicly, against the backdrop of Gaza, about respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, illegal occupation and international law, while in Cyprus “Turkey is doing exactly the opposite.”
