“Dear Gabrielius, it is a great pleasure for me to be in Vilnius today, and I must say that the visit of a Greek minister here in Vilnius is overdue.
We have no problem between us, no bilateral dispute to discuss. But we have a lot of things that unite us, that bring us together, and a lot of things we can do together.
And although we are geographically quite far apart, we share a common destiny since we are both at the borders of the EU. And there are many questions which concern the borders of the EU, the borders of our Union. And we discussed it today. We have already discussed a few of them and will discuss them further, later in my visit.
We started with migration. Once again, if you will allow me to repeat – since I am here with my dear colleague – we can help Lithuania in any way we can. We have the experience of a bigger neighbor who instrumentalizes the migratory phenomenon and drives migratory flows towards the EU border. So, dear Gabrielius, we can make our services available to you on the strength of our experience in this area. And if there is anything we can do to help you, please let us know. We provide you with human resources and our know-how, and we can also raise the issue within the Council of Ministers [de l’UE], so that it is treated as a European challenge, because it is indeed a European challenge.
We discussed our economic relations. Let me be frank and open: we are not satisfied with the level of our economic cooperation. There is much more we can do. There are many initiatives, such as the Three Seas initiative or the interconnection of our railways, which could help us improve our economic relations.
It will also help us to tackle energy issues. We will discuss energy issues over lunch; of how we might diversify our energy sources. And there is one question that I will raise over lunch, and I hope that does not take away our appetites, and that is the Astravets nuclear power plant. We are very sensitive to the issue of nuclear energy. I must say that I am old enough to remember what it means to have a nuclear accident in his neighborhood. So we have a similar problem with Akkuyu. Both cases are related to Russian technology and we would like to deal with them together. We have to see how nuclear power plants will go with the EU and be built in such a way as to ensure a high level of safety in the event of an accident in neighboring countries.
We also discussed a bit about the relationship between Greece, the European Union and Turkey. As you know, Prime Minister Mitsotakis met President Erdoğan in Brussels yesterday. Your President also met President Erdoğan yesterday. Unfortunately I have to say that the meeting between Prime Minister Mitsotakis and President Erdoğan broke the ice, but it was not a breakthrough. As Prime Minister Mitsotakis said later, the differences are there, the differences still exist, and they are big and important.
We also discussed the problem with Belarus and the issue of the plane that left Athens and was forced to land in Minsk. For us, this is totally unacceptable. And – let me repeat it here in Vilnius – this is not something we are going to forget. We will coordinate our actions and cooperate; this is a major question. This is an act of piracy and we are going to deal with it in the proper way.
We still have a lot of things to discuss and I would like, dear Gabrielius, to thank you for this great opportunity that you have given me to be in Vilnius today.
Thank you so much “.
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