The Greek prime minister on Thursday spoke at length about his upcoming visit to Ankara next week, as well as the only difference he insists separates Athens and Ankara, i.e. delimitating maritime regions, such as the continental shelf in the Aegean.

Asked by the Foreign Policy (FP) editor in chief about this week’s tragedy just off the eastern Aegean Island of Chios, where 15 migrants died after their boat collided with a Greek coast guard vessel, Kyriakos Mitsotakis underlined the need for a “full investigation”.  “My preliminary, and I stress this, information is that essentially our Coast Guard ship was rammed by a much smaller boat. We don’t know why this happened” he said.

Mitsotakis added that such incidents occur frequently in the Aegean, blaming smugglers for endangering lives. “You have smugglers putting people without life vests. You have 40 people crammed into a 30-foot boat with very strong engines; the sole purpose is to get to a Greek island,” he said. “My Coast Guard, we’re not a welcoming committee. Our job is to protect our borders, but our job is also to save people whose lives are threatened. And if it were not for the Coast Guard, we would have had more people die after this accident.”

Speaking about the problem of irregular migration, Mitsotakis argued that Greece is pursuing a tough but fair policy, saying his government believes that someone who enters the country illegally and is not entitled to asylum should be returned to their home country.

With regard to Euro-Atlantic relations, the Greek prime minister stressed that he has not abandoned them, while acknowledging that the ties that shaped the Western world order “have weakened, but are still there.”

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