According to official reports, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Greece met on Sunday in Cairo in response to contentious marine and gas agreements that their common foe, Turkey, made with a leader of Libya.
In recent years, Cairo and Athens have improved their ties, working together to develop energy resources, fight terrorism, and establish new maritime border accords with Cyprus.
Nikos Dendias, the foreign minister of Greece, and Sameh Shukry, his Egyptian counterpart, discussed the memoranda of understanding between Turkey and Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, the head of one of Libya’s two contending governments, at a joint press conference.
Such accords, according to him, pose a risk to the peace of the region.
The agreements, which were signed last week in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, call for the cooperative exploitation of hydrocarbon reserves in Libya’s territorial waters and offshore areas.
Dendias denounced the agreements, claiming they violated Greek waters.
While this was going on, the Egyptian foreign minister asserted that Dbeibah’s administration lacked the legal right to make such agreements because its term had come to an end after Libya failed to hold national elections in December of the previous year.
He argued that the U.N. should not remain silent and should instead take a firm stance on the legitimacy of Dbeibah’s government.
The accords between Turkey and the Dbeibah government come three years after another contentious pact between Ankara and an earlier Tripoli administration.
This 2019 agreement increased Turkey’s already-existing tensions with Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt over drilling rights in the area by giving Turkey access to a disputed economic zone in the gas-rich eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Dendias claimed that the two ministers also spoke about the Aegean Sea in relation to tensions with Turkey stemming from reports that Greece had sent dozens of armored vehicles produced in the United States to the Aegean islands of Samos and Lesbos.
Both the Turkish government and the government of Dbeibah were silent right away.
