‘What was Mitsotakis doing in Ukraine?’
“So a Russian ballistic missile nearly killed the Greek prime minister as he was visiting Odesa with Zelensky today. The Greek prime minister. The leader of the NATO and EU member with the largest sympathies for Russia,” Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of The Wall Street journal and author, commented on X on the day of the attack. “At Maximos Mansion [the prime minister’s office in Athens] they voiced surprise that not one opposition party issued a statement on the very serious incident at Odesa,” Kathimerini reporters Vassilis Nedos and Stavros Papantoniou noted. Their reportage concerned indications that the Russians knew that Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Volodymyr Zelenskyy were in the area when the attack took place.
It is surprising that anyone can still be surprised by the behavior of Russia and of our political players. For years we have known that the belligerence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia has no limits. Also, the complacency and navel-gazing of our politicians is undisturbed by acts of war against a rival, even when he is representing our country in a city of great symbolic significance for all Greeks (as Odesa is where the secret society agitating for liberation in the early 19th century was established). Although Russia’s popularity has dropped since the invasion of Ukraine, the attack on Odesa made many in Greece ask, “What was Mitsotakis doing there?” In effect, they blame him, not Putin.
In Greece, foreign policy and domestic politics are inextricable. We have learned to interpret diplomacy as the focus on “national issues” only, seeing everything as black and white, each judging things on the basis of our side’s patriotism and our rivals’ capitulation. A multidimensional foreign policy which aims at strengthening the country in the broader region is either ignored or seen as serving foreign interests. The debate includes questions such as: Why do we support Ukraine? Why are we involved in protecting shipping in the Red Sea? Are we perhaps too compliant as allies of the United States and should we instead treat everything as a transaction, as Turkey does? Why do we need consensus between parties to solve problems with our neighbors? Does this signal “retreat,” does it “reek of an appetite for capitulation,” as former prime minister Antonis Samaras suggests? And so, our governments either try to solve problems on their own or they avoid disturbing the illusion of blessed unanimity.
This government’s intense diplomatic activity may have been triggered by Ankara’s belligerence (with the absurd Turkish-Libyan memorandum), but it soon became clear that, in any case, Greece needed to strengthen old alliances and forge new ones. This would help deal with Turkey and also give Greece a voice in international developments. Athens’ clear position in support of Ukraine, its involvement in providing security for shipping, its support of the Western Balkan countries’ EU accession, its contacts with countries in Asia and Africa, helped strengthen Greece’s voice in Washington, Brussels, Paris and Berlin. This led also to the current warming in relations with Turkey.
Whatever Mitsotakis may be doing in foreign policy, he cannot evade domestic concerns. Buffeted by the reactions against the recent bill promoting marriage equality, he may seek to improve ties with the more conservative part of his party’s supporters and thus nominate candidates for the European Parliament elections from the more militant right. This will curtail the country’s freedom of movement on the diplomatic stage and will also test the prime minister’s “triangulation” technique, with which he has gained ground on both the left and the right in order to control the center of the political spectrum.
