The foreign ministers of Greece and Italy on Tuesday are set to sign a bilateral agreement to delimitate exclusive maritime zones between the two countries, which in this case means the sea regions in the Ionian Sea and extreme southern Adriatic.
Italian FM Luigi Di Maio arrived in Athens early on Tuesday morning for talks with his Greek counterpart, Nikos Dendias, with the agreement expected to be signed afterwards.
The development is seen as the first tangible answer to Turkey's increasingly high-pitched provocations in the eastern Mediterranean, especially in the wake of its agreement late last year with the embattled UN-recognized government in Tripoli, Libya to divide portions of the central and eastern Mediterranean between them -- essentially by erasing every island off the map, including Crete.
The Fayez al-Sarraj Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, however, holds only a small portion of the large North Africa country, and is in a bitter struggle with the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army, led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Massive Turkish aid, including military equipment and the dispatch of jihadi mercenaries from Syrian battlefields, has so far propped up al-Sarraj.
Turkey, on its part, is neither a signatory or an adherent of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in opposition to every EU member-state. As such, Ankara unilaterally defines maritime law, especially in calculating exclusive economic zones.
Greece is reportedly in late-stage negotiations with Egypt to delimitate an EEZ between them in the east to southeast Mediterranean, a development that would directly disrupt Ankara's unilateral bid to apply maritime boundaries based only on its own interpretation.
