Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Saturday that “important legal obstacles” prevent the unblocking of deliveries of US-made F-35 stealth warplanes to Turkey.
“It is not our job to tell the US which systems it will and will not sell to a country, but there are legal problems that we do not see how they will be overcome,” he said at a scheduled press conference on the second day of the 90th Thessaloniki International Fair.
He also reiterated Greece is one of the five NATO countries that allocates 3.5% of its GDP to defense, not just to honor its commitments to the Alliance, but because Greece “is in a situation that requires us to be shielded and to always be able to project strong deterrence capabilities.”
Commenting on the defense deal signed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which pursues collective deterrence, similar to NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, Mitsotakis said it is “a development certainly worth monitoring” which does not change Greek foreign policy’s priorities to pursue strong relations with all Gulf countries, and announced that he will be travelling to Saudi Arabia in the near future “to reaffirm the strategic space of this relationship.”
“It does not mean that just because the Mecca agreement may have brought Turkey closer [to Saudi Arabia] we are automatically distancing ourselves. Foreign policy is much more complex than that,” he said.
