... outstanding opportunity for the EU to move towards self-sufficiency in its natural gas demands. However, the natural gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean also had other non-European parties claiming for their own national shares. Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Cyprus alongside with Israel have also claimed for proportional shares. Although, the resources are sufficient enough for these states to share the extraction, but Turkey began to exploit its territorial disputes over Cyprus in favour of dominating the ...
... Putin’s non-communist Russia, with neo-Trumanism the order of the day. Greece has of course every right to worry about Turkey, given the expulsion from Turkey of almost all those of Greek stock in 1964; at least three near wars; Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974; the continuing occupation of over one third of the island; the Imia crisis; Turkey’s declaration that Greece’s activation of the extension of her maritime borders to twelve nautical miles would constitute a casus belli; recent naval ...
... serious form of EU supranational military co-operation, in order to keep NATO going, and to continue the Cold War. Fifteen years ago, I visited the British ambassador to Greece, former colleague Simon Gass. When I mentioned an idea for a solution to the Cyprus problem his immediate reaction, almost automatically spastic, was: ‘But what would the Americans say?’. On leaving, he said: ‘Oh, you must come to dinner!’. I am still waiting. I sometimes wonder whether I should have stayed in Britain ...
.... military-industrial-congressional complex and an atavistic Russia-hating Poland, saw an opportunity to become a world policeman. This helps to explain why, in contrast to Berlin, NATO decided to keep Nicosia as the world’s last divided city. For Cyprus is in fact NATO’s southernmost point, de facto. And to have resolved Cyprus’ problem by heeding UN resolutions and getting rid of all foreign forces and re-unifying the country would have meant that NATO would have ‘lost’ Cyprus: hardly ...
... to remember that gas reserves in the Mediterranean shelf discovered in the XXI century total
over 3.8 trillion
cubic meters. The key fields are Zohr off the coast of Egypt, Tamar and Leviathan off the coast of Israel, and Aphrodite off the coast of Cyprus, etc. Additionally, the so- called Block 9 is in a part of the field disputed by Lebanon. We can suppose there are large gas reserves off the Syrian coast, as well. By 2020, development had already been launched on several fields but, on the whole,...
... powers. Most European states depend on imports of energy resources, which means that taking hold of new gas sources is an important element for strengthening their energy security and diversifying their sources of hydrocarbon supplies.
Currently, Greece, Cyprus, France, and Italy are among the main players that have divided up the known and future gas deposits in the Mediterranean among themselves. All these states are EU members. We should add that other EU states also indirectly benefit from new resources,...
..., places Russia 30
th
among 30 states, below Turkey's 29th score. Admittedly, these are quite “Russophobic” times in the West, except for occasional positive gestures by some Western capitals and the explicit support for many Russian policies by Cyprus and Greece. Moscow, then, must struggle to undermine widespread anti-Russian propaganda. Hence it seems to Russophile Greeks of Cyprus and Greece that Russia should also contain its own “Turkey problem.” For during the current Russia-Turkey ...
The Cyprus story serves as a useful example of Britain’s submissiveness that led to today’s lack of independence
It is perhaps well enough known that both the US and the USSR encouraged the end of the British Empire, the former for business reasons ...
... Financial Times (once known for its balance and seriousness) on 13 May, comes another new Cold War ‘report’ – devoid of analysis – in the same newspaper, entitled – more in the style of a tabloid paper than a serious one – ‘Moscow on the Med: Cyprus and its Russians’, and dramatically sub-titled ‘As tensions between the Kremlin and EU rise, the tiny island has become a Petri dish of western worries’. This is tabloid sensationalism. The title sets the tone. The reader is meant to assume,...
... time, and enormous public pressure for an investigation. Why, then, should we have to wait forty-two years to expose another former British Prime Minister - and his Foreign Office minders? The story is simple. On July 20, 1974, Turkish army landed in Cyprus and began a progressive occupation, slowed down by subsequent talks. British Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, was heavily involved the following month in talks with the Turks and Greeks in Geneva. Source: Shutterstock Official documents clearly ...
