Admiral Evangelos Apostolakis, former Minister of National Defence, made extremely strong statements on SKAI TV when discussing Turkish actions against Greece.
According to the admiral, the "evil" occurring is that public opinion is being corrupted by Ankara's moves and they are creating situations "that are slowly becoming permanent."
"We recently heard about the news and the announcements of 'routine flights'. Violation flights became routine flights. These are the very bad things," Apostolakis stressed, adding that Greece "is both submissive and compromising because we do not want to create ruptures."
The admiral explained how recently Turkish violations have intensified and have been qualitatively upgraded, as there has never been so many air violations over inhabited Greek islands in the eastern Aegean that are clearly Greek territory.
"What I have said many times is that this thing needs to be stopped, someone needs to stop them," he said, adding that while we continue to say that Turkey is under pressure and not economically viable, it seems that it can continue to work."
Responding to a question, he said that of course the phrase that has been said in the past is true - if Turks climb on a rocky islet it should be levelled, otherwise the state has no status, there is no sovereignty and no Armed Forces.
"It simply came to our notice then. But you have no other choice, otherwise there is no state status. There is no sovereignty. There are no Armed Forces. If not, what do we do? Can you tell me why we swallow the aerial violations at sea? Because we do not want to make war on an issue that can be handled differently. But when land is occupied, you can not say otherwise, what will you say? Isn't that what you see? Things must be clear," stressed Apostolakis.
