Ukraine war boosts Europeanism in border-wary Greece
Despite their firm pro-Western policy, Greeks remain wary of both the US and Russia as they fight a proxy war in Ukraine
ATHENS, Greece – The bonds between Greece and Russia run deep. Greek monks converted the Russians to Orthodox Christianity and gave them their alphabet in the 9th century. Russia’s navy helped secure Greek independence from the Ottoman empire a thousand years later. There persists a mystical belief among some Greeks that Russia will eventually help them reconquer Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, their former imperial capital, which fell to the Turks in 1453.
This background partly explains why Greece is one of the least anti-Russian countries in the Western camp, and why Russia is fighting fiercely for its allegiance.
A Eurobarometer poll on May 6 showed that 53% of Greeks support sanctions against Russia, compared to an EU average of 80%. Just 40% of Greeks supported financing weapons purchases for Ukraine, versus 67% of Europeans.
A mid-March survey by Politico showed that 60% of Greeks found Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “unacceptable”, versus 71-86% in the EU’s four largest economies.
This was surprising, because Greeks unanimously abhor Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and its declaration of a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus there, which it alone recognises. Russia’s recognition of the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk and subsequent invasion there directly mirror Turkish policy.
“Both Moscow and Ankara have claimed that they seek to protect compatriots who have supposedly suffered by the majority ethnicity. In reality, both Russia and Turkey have weaponized minorities to undermine the sovereignty of independent states for geopolitical and ideological reasons,” says Dr. Emmanuel Karagiannis, reader in international security at King's College London.
Following this logic, the Greek government has broken with public opinion. “We took sides. Unequivocally. We stand by Ukraine against Putin’s aggression… He will not succeed,” Greek premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis told a joint session of Congress on May 17 to a standing ovation.
That occasion itself was a high watermark of Greek-US relations. Three fifths of Greek parliament recently ratified a much-expanded defence agreement with the US, which allows Washington to use its port of Alexandroupolis as a logistics hub for the supply of NATO allies Romania and Bulgaria. From Alexandroupolis it is only a 750km drive to the Ukrainian and Moldovan borders, and much weaponry is rumoured to have been shipped to Ukraine via Greece.
Greece was also one of the first Western countries to openly send Ukraine weapons in March. It wasn’t much – two C-130 transport planes loaded with Kalashnikov rifles, bullets and rocket-propelled grenades intended for Libya, which Greece had confiscated on the high seas as part of an EU weapons embargo. But Greece’s direct intervention with lethal matériel was symbolic. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zaharova called the decision “deeply mistaken” and “criminal”.
Two thirds of Greece society agreed with her, and the government didn’t repeat the move, but its pro-Ukraine policy hasn’t changed.
In early April some 200 Russian diplomats were expelled from European capitals in protest against the apparent war crimes committed in Bucha. Greece expelled 12 of them – a propotionally high number.
Russia is clearly annoyed. Zaharova said Greece was actively “deconstructing” bilateral relations. “The Greek state, which was created with Russia’s help and whose first leader was the Russian foreign minister, is effectively left without diplomatic relations with our country,” she said.
Playing on these historic themes is misleading, says Alexander Kitroeff, professor of history at Haverford College. “Russian foreign policy from the 1860s’s onwards is panslavist, pro-Bulgaria, pro-Serbia, and Serbia and Bulgaria become Greece’s rivals over Macedonia. So in effect Russia is not on Greece’s side, it’s on the opposite side,” he told Al Jazeera.
But “it’s not so much a question of losing Russian support,” says Yiorgos Katrougalos, former foreign minister with the leftwing Syriza party, as not being taken for granted by the allies one is appeasing.
“Even the US… has actually reduced its support for Greek positions,” he told Al Jazeera. “They withdrew support for the East Med [gas pipeline], and even from the East Med Act of 2019 which provided for the US monitoring Turkish violations of Greek airspace.”
The East Med, a pipeline Greece has pledged to build with Cyprus and Israel to transport Israeli and Cypriot gas to the EU market, has been a major irritant to Turkey. And Turkey has made a policy of violating Greek airspace as a way of showing it disputes Greek sovereignty in the east Aegean.
Katrougalos’ wariness of the US is not just a leftwing obsession. It permeates Greek society because the Nixon administration failed to prevent the Cyprus invasion in 1974. Many Greeks believe then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger actively encouraged it. And NATO, which counts both Greece and Turkey as allies, does little to prevent overflights of Greek islands by Turkish F-16s.
“The Russians have nothing to offer Greece in terms of controlling Turkey, and wouldn’t want to if they could,” says Konstantinos Filis, who directs the Global Affairs Institute at the American College of Greece. “The red line of the Americans [vis-à-vis Turkey] seems to be the avoidance of war [with Greece]. But that is not enough for Greece. It means Turkey has a wide scope for doing things to Greece it shouldn’t do.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Greeks have come to regard the US and Russia with almost equal suspicion, and are instead Europeanists. A survey of Greek opinion conducted by the think tank Dianeosis just after the war in Ukraine broke out asked Greeks to pick a single dependable ally. Only 6.7% picked the US, and just 4.8% picked Russia, but 65% chose France, with which Greece signed a defensive alliance last year.
Greece, NATO’s top per capita defence spender, is also among the EU’s top supporters of a European army, but the Ukraine war is pushing that prospect further into the future, say experts.
“European defence is a dream for some of us… the Ukraine war taught us that there is no European security without the US and NATO. The [membership bids] by Finland and Sweden underline that,” says Filis.
Katrougalos agrees. “If we want Europe to be independent on the international stage, it will have to show strategic autonomy and European sovereignty… [we want] a Europe that will be an international player with a balancing role.”