PARIS — "Turkey cannot constantly try to blackmail Europe," Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, who is in Paris for a meeting with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian, said in an interview with the French newspaper "Le Figaro."

He also said that "Paris realized from the outset that Turkey's challenges affect not only Greece and Cyprus, but the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean."

According to the Foreign Minister, "Turkey has dangerously escalated its provocative stance in the Eastern Mediterranean", while referring to the violations of the national airspace and territorial waters of Greece, the overflights of armed fighters over inhabited islands, as well as over Greek land in Evros, the violation of the national sovereignty of Cyprus, but also the effort to violate European land borders at the end of February and the beginning of March in Evros that failed.

The above, Dendias noted, was added to Turkey's illegal and invalid agreement with the Fayez al-Sarraj government in Libya and its de facto involvement in the civil war.

"In its broader illegal effort to expand its sovereignty and sovereign rights in the Eastern Mediterranean, it is using illegal methods such as sending research vessels to a Greek continental shelf area, trying to question it. Our government will not allow it," he stressed.

Διαβάστε εδώ https://t.co/7Xd4YzqDof ολόκληρη τη σημερινή μου συνέντευξη στην εφημερίδα @Le_Figaro. pic.twitter.com/GEYFwhv49j

— Nikos Dendias (@NikosDendias) June 15, 2020