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.