Russia has repeatedly drawn the attention of the Greek government to the issue of the threat to the civilian population, including the Greek community in Donbas, Ukraine, from the shipment of weapons systems and ammunition, Russian Foreign Ministry official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“We have said that indirect participation in the Ukrainian conflict, i.e. through sending equipment and means of warfare to the Kyiv regime, poses a threat to the civilian population. You understand, of course, that these weapons and shells do not ask for nationality and do not ask you to show your identity. They simply kill people and that is the end of it. Of all nationalities.
This applies to Donbas, Azov, and other areas where historically a large Greek community resides numbering over 300,000. A Greek presence throughout the Black Sea area existed long before the beginnings of Kyivan Rus’. Some present-day Greeks in Ukraine are the descendants of Pontic Greeks from the Pontus region between the fall of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829.
Ancient Greek colonies (6th century BCE–1st century BCE) Greeks established colonies on what are now the Ukrainian shores of the Black Sea as early as the 6th century BCE. These colonies traded with various ancient nations around the Black Sea, including Scythians, Maeotae, Cimmerians, Goths, and predecessors of the Slavs.
Responsible for this is the Greek leadership, which will have to answer before its people,” said M. Zakharova, who claimed that the data of these attacks with Western weapons are recorded, “of course, and there is no doubt that they exist in the Ministry of Defense of our country.”
Asked if there have been any consultations between the Greek and Russian governments on the transfer or not to Ukraine of the S-300 anti-aircraft missiles stationed in Crete, Zakharova said that Moscow records without exception “all hostile actions, whether it is Greece or any other country, and we give a clear response to them, political, diplomatic, military. You know that all the equipment carried by the NATO guys, as our military people say, we are ‘grinding’ it successfully and we will continue to do so. There should be no illusions about this. We in this sense have made our choice.”
According to the Russian senior diplomat, Moscow has “several times warned” Athens “to (avoid) any violation of the Greek-Russian intergovernmental agreement on military-technical cooperation” of October 30, 1995, “where there are strict obligations not to hand over to third countries without mutual written agreement equipment and military means acquired in the framework of bilateral military cooperation.”
“We will continue to demand from Greece, as well as from all other countries to which Russian weapons systems and technical means had been exported, to strictly adhere to this important bilateral document,” the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman concluded.
