In 2019, the renewal of the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement [MDCA] between Greece and the United States highlighted the Pentagon’s interest in Alexandroupoli’s port facilities, which few people cared about at the time. At the time, the American side was looking for an alternative to the ports of Piraeus [67% owned by the Chinese state-owned group COSCO] and Thessaloniki [owned by the Greek-Russian businessman Ivan Savvidis], in particular for sending troops to Romania.
Since then, with the war in Ukraine, the port of Alexandroupoli has become more strategic than ever. Overlooking the Thracian Sea and providing a maritime link with the island of Samothrace, which is also the subject of a dispute with Turkey, it is a gateway to the Black Sea region in particular, and to southeastern Europe in general. And all this without having to pass through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, currently closed to all military shipping by Ankara.
Given that France leads NATO’s multinational battalion deployed in Romania [Aigle mission] and that Germany has had problems with the transit of Leclerc tanks, Alexandroupoli is bound to be of interest to the Joint Chiefs of Staff [EMA]… to the point of establishing a permanent presence there. In any case, discussions are currently underway to this end, as Konstantinos Chatzimichail, head of the port authority for this town of 70,000 inhabitants, has indicated.
“A two-hour technical meeting with French officers from the Centre d’Appui Stratégique Transport & Ravitaillement on the use of the port of Alexandroupolis by the French Armed Forces, eight months after the first exploratory contact”, he recently indicated via Twitter.
How much more petty can this government get.
Using people’s paranoia to distract them from sky high inflation.
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In 2019, the renewal of the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement [MDCA] between Greece and the United States highlighted the Pentagon’s interest in Alexandroupoli’s port facilities, which few people cared about at the time. At the time, the American side was looking for an alternative to the ports of Piraeus [67% owned by the Chinese state-owned group COSCO] and Thessaloniki [owned by the Greek-Russian businessman Ivan Savvidis], in particular for sending troops to Romania.
Since then, with the war in Ukraine, the port of Alexandroupoli has become more strategic than ever. Overlooking the Thracian Sea and providing a maritime link with the island of Samothrace, which is also the subject of a dispute with Turkey, it is a gateway to the Black Sea region in particular, and to southeastern Europe in general. And all this without having to pass through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, currently closed to all military shipping by Ankara.
Given that France leads NATO’s multinational battalion deployed in Romania [Aigle mission] and that Germany has had problems with the transit of Leclerc tanks, Alexandroupoli is bound to be of interest to the Joint Chiefs of Staff [EMA]… to the point of establishing a permanent presence there. In any case, discussions are currently underway to this end, as Konstantinos Chatzimichail, head of the port authority for this town of 70,000 inhabitants, has indicated.
“A two-hour technical meeting with French officers from the Centre d’Appui Stratégique Transport & Ravitaillement on the use of the port of Alexandroupolis by the French Armed Forces, eight months after the first exploratory contact”, he recently indicated via Twitter.
How much more petty can this government get.
Using people’s paranoia to distract them from sky high inflation.