After months of bilateral tensions over maritime borders and gas exploration rights, Turkish and Greek diplomats are scheduled to resume on Jan. 25 talks in Istanbul on long-standing territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea. The meeting will break a nearly five-year hiatus in the talks, but the prospect of any meaningful de-escalation and confidence-building appears elusive.

The meeting will mark the 61st round in the so-called exploratory talks between the two troubled neighbors, initiated nearly two decades ago in a bid to define and resolve a tangle of clashing territorial claims in the Aegean. The two sides have reported little progress over the years, while the disputes — involving continental shelves, airspace boundaries, islets with disputed ownership and Greece’s militarization of islands close to Turkey’s shores — have grown even more complex since the last round in March 2016 amid a fresh row over gas drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ankara signed a maritime delimitation deal with Libya’s Tripoli-based Government of National Accord in November 2019, while Greece struck a similar deal with Egypt in August. The agreements cover overlapping zones in the Eastern Mediterranean, meaning that the Turkish-Greek disputes have spilled over beyond the Aegean, growing into a regional crisis involving other littoral states.

The Turkish-Greek exploratory talks began in 2002 amid a thaw in bilateral ties, spearheaded by then Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Cem and his Greek counterpart, George Papandreou. The process has been volatile, mirroring the ups and downs in bilateral ties. While more than 30 rounds of talks took place in the first three years, the dialogue became less frequent or fell into lengthy hiatuses in the ensuing years.