ATHENS (Reuters) – Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya said on Tuesday she hopes the will shown by her Turkish counterpart to open a dialogue on oil drilling in the Eastern Mediterranean will be followed by actual dialogue.
“This has to be put into action. It’s not enough to say you want to talk,” she told a new conference in Athens following a visit to Turkey, where she said her counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, mentioned a will to pause exploration in the area for at least a month.
Following her visit, a top Turkish official said Turkey could pause energy-exploration operations in the eastern Mediterranean Sea for a while, pending talks with Greece.
“I hope this message will materialise,” Gonzalez Laya said.
Turkey is at loggerheads with Greece and Cyprus over overlapping claims for offshore reserves and the two EU members, along with France, have rejected Turkey’s plan to explore between Cyprus and Crete.
(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Inti Landauro; Editing by Alex Richardson)
