Nicosia-Sana
Cyprus has confirmed that the Turkish regime's dispatch of a drilling vessel to an area off its coast constitutes a serious escalation and a new violation of Cyprus' sovereign rights.
The Turkish regime sent an exploration ship to waters off southern Cyprus, where Cypriot authorities have already granted offshore oil and gas exploration rights to Italian and French companies.
"Ankara is resorting to the thuggish methods of decades gone by," the Cypriot presidency said in a statement, stressing that the new provocation was an example of the Turkish regime's defiance of repeated calls by the European Union and the international community to stop its illegal activities.
The statement called on Turkey to respect the sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus to explore and exploit its natural resources within its maritime areas, warning that the provocative and aggressive behavior of Ankara, which chose to irreversibly depart from international legitimacy, would endanger security and stability in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Turkish drilling vessel, Yavuz, stopped this morning about 51 nautical miles southwest of Cyprus, the second Turkish ship to dock near the coast of Cyprus in recent months as another vessel, the Fateh, docked off the west coast of Cyprus since early May.
The regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced in a message broadcast last May on the International Maritime Messaging Service Navtex intends to conduct gas exploration until last September in a region of the Mediterranean Sea Cyprus confirms that it is within the exclusive economic zone of the island.
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