Expectations by the Greek side are low ahead of Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s scheduled meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Meeting in New York, on Wednesday.

The main aim is to confirm the “calm waters of the Aegean” that have prevailed in recent months in Greek-Turkish relations and will take place at the so-called “Turkish House” in New York, i.e. at the headquarters of Ankara’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations.

Greek diplomacy, however, notes despite the new rhetorical shift of the Turkish President, who has abandoned the provocations of the recent past with threats of “we will come overnight” and now talks about “Greek-Turkish friendship”, he still seeks recognition of the pseudo-state in Cyprus by partitioning the island into states, while attacking the Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Bob Menendez, who supports the Greek position and is a leading figure in blocking the sale of warplanes to Turkey.

Foreign Ministers George Gerapetritis and Hakan Fidan met in New York on Monday to prepare the agenda and timetables for today’s meeting between the two leaders, which is the sixth in a row since 2019, when they had their first one-on-one meeting again on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Associates of the Prime Minister told protothema.gr that they “do not expect anything shocking” from this new meeting referring back to what Kyriakos Mitsotakis said at his press conference last Sunday at the Thessaloniki International Exhibition Centre. “A meeting between me and President Erdogan will always be an object of great interest, but the normalisation of communication channels is welcome for two countries which are doomed by geography to be neighbours”, he had said.

“I am not naive and I am well aware that the policies of countries do not change from one moment to the next,” he had said, adding. “But I owe it to myself to explore this window of opportunity, if it gives us the opportunity to really achieve something that my predecessors may not have been able to achieve. But even if we cannot achieve it, because we will very simply end up not being able to agree, that does not oblige us to be permanently in the red and in the tension that we have experienced over the last four years.”