Turkey declared jurisdiction over waters east of Crete on Friday, issuing a rival maritime navigation notice that direct...

Turkey declared jurisdiction over waters east of Crete on Friday, issuing a rival maritime navigation notice that directly challenges Greece's authority to manage the area. The Turkish Antalya station reissued the NAVTEX for the Eunomia 2026 multinational exercise, copying the exact coordinates from the Greek Heraklion notice, while stating that Heraklion has no competence to issue navigation warnings there. The Eunomia 2026 exercise, scheduled for October 19, involves Greece, France, Italy, and Cyprus in a live-fire air-naval drill south of Kastellorizo. Turkey's move is not a direct ban on the exercise itself, but a claim of jurisdictional authority, asserting that any maritime activity in the area, military exercises or cable surveys, must be authorized through Ankara. The timing is deliberate. The same waters overlap with the planned survey route for the Great Sea Interconnector, the EU-backed undersea electricity cable that would end Cyprus's isolation from the European grid by connecting it directly to Crete. The French research vessel Abeille Marengo is expected to conduct seabed surveys ahead of cable installation, with a separate NAVTEX pending for that phase of work. Current survey operations are confined to Greek territorial waters, well within the six-nautical-mile limit, keeping the project out of Turkey's direct reach for now. Analysts, including Adonis Klapsys, consider a Turkish military response a near certainty once cable-laying operations extend into international waters east of Kasos, with the key question being whether Ankara sends a warship. Turkey's claim maps directly onto its "Blue Homeland" doctrine, the sweeping maritime sovereignty claim that covers vast stretches of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. Athens has already approved the current survey phase through the Foreign Ministry, signaling that Greece is treating every step of this project as a diplomatic and strategic decision, not just a technical one. #Greece #Turkey #GreatSeaInterconnector