Turkish Violations of Greek Airspace and the 2015 Su-24 Downing

Facebook ↗WhatsApp ↗
0 0 Edit this post
Turkey violated Greek airspace 2,244 times in 2014 alone - A Greek Air Force officer operates the radar of a Patriot air defence missiles at Tatoi air base, north of Athens - Yiorgos Karahalis - Reuters
A Greek Air Force officer at the radar of a Patriot air defence system at Tatoi air base, north of Athens. Photo: Yiorgos Karahalis / Reuters

When Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber on 24 November 2015, saying it had strayed into Turkish airspace for about 17 seconds, many Greeks reacted with disbelief. Their point was simple: by Greek military counts, Turkish aircraft had entered Greek airspace 2,244 times in 2014 alone, and Greece had never answered with missiles. To them, Ankara’s outrage over a few seconds looked like a double standard.

This article explains what happened in November 2015, what the Greek figures actually count, and why the airspace over the Aegean has been contested for decades.

The Su-24 shootdown in brief

On the morning of 24 November 2015 a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24M near the Syrian–Turkish border. Turkey said the jet had entered its airspace by about two kilometres for roughly 17 seconds and had ignored around ten warnings. Russia said the aircraft never left Syrian airspace and that no warnings were given.

Both crew members ejected. The pilot, Oleg Peshkov, was killed by gunfire from the ground as he parachuted down, and a Russian marine, Alexander Pozynich, died during the rescue mission. The navigator, Konstantin Murakhtin, was recovered. Moscow responded with economic sanctions, including a ban on charter flights to Turkey. Relations only began to thaw in June 2016, when President Erdoğan sent President Putin a letter of condolence.

Why Greeks pointed to their own skies

Within hours, Greek social media users and many foreign commentators were asking what would happen if Greece applied Turkey’s rule to the Turkish jets that regularly cross into Greek-claimed airspace over the Aegean. Several of the posts shared at the time are below.

Turkey violating Greece Airspace 40 times a day @tpel78 @TouchMyTweets @JohnJwso @ArRuple https://t.co/DKD6WLc3mO pic.twitter.com/XBXyDyQGBA

— Aud رمز (@CodeAud) Νοέμβριος 25, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)





The Greek government made the same link in more diplomatic language. Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias phoned his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to offer condolences, and according to the Russian Foreign Ministry he expressed solidarity with Moscow. Greek officials noted that Greece had lived with repeated violations of its own airspace for years. A few days later, on 29 November, tweets criticising Turkish overflights appeared on Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s party account after an EU–Turkey summit, then were deleted and replaced with a more conciliatory message.

What the violation figures count

The 2,244 figure comes from the Greek military’s records. It was published in November 2015 by the Greek newspaper Proto Thema, which cited statistics compiled at the University of Thessaly, and the same number was charted by the data site Statista. The same series showed 636 violations in 2013, so 2014 marked a sharp rise.

Figures for 2015 vary with the cut-off date and source. Greek military counts reported at the time put the total for January to October at between roughly 1,200 and 1,450, including around 30 flights directly over Greek territory. Greek media also reported about 175 incursions by Turkish naval vessels into waters Greece regards as its own in the first seven months of the year.

It helps to know that Greece records two different kinds of incident:

  • Violations are entries into what Greece considers its national airspace.
  • Infringements (sometimes called transgressions) are breaches of air traffic rules in the Athens Flight Information Region, for example military flights that do not file a flight plan.

Reports do not always say which category a number includes, which is one reason totals from different outlets do not match.

Pot... ketel.... Violations of Greek airspace by Turkish Airforce https://t.co/P2RBisbFIC pic.twitter.com/EE3lGJa8pT

— Stephan Okhuijsen (@steeph) Νοέμβριος 24, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

The six-versus-ten-mile dispute

At the heart of the airspace argument is a gap of four nautical miles. Both countries currently claim six nautical miles of territorial sea in the Aegean. Greece, however, claims ten nautical miles of airspace around its coasts and islands, a limit it says dates back to 1931 and was long accepted by its neighbours, including Turkey.

Since 1974 Turkey has rejected that outer belt, citing rules of the International Civil Aviation Organization to argue that national airspace must match the width of territorial waters. In Turkey’s view, its aircraft flying between six and ten miles from Greek islands are in international airspace. In Greece’s view, they are inside Greek airspace. Many of the incidents counted as violations happen in that contested band.

The maritime side is tied in. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea allows states up to twelve nautical miles of territorial sea, and Greece reserves the right to extend to that limit. Turkey, which has not joined the convention, has said that such a move would be a cause for war: its parliament formally declared a casus belli in June 1995.

Thanos Dokos, then head of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, summed up how Athens saw Ankara’s aim in a 2015 interview with Politico: “The Turks are trying to enforce sovereignty over disputed islands and bring Greece to the negotiating table.”

A long and costly standoff

The airspace dispute is part of a wider set of Aegean disagreements over territorial waters, the continental shelf, the status of some islets and the militarisation of eastern islands. It has also been shaped by the 1974 Turkish invasion and continuing occupation of northern Cyprus, which deepened mistrust between the two NATO allies.

The standoff has been dangerous at times. In January 1996 a confrontation over the Imia islets brought the two countries close to conflict, and three Greek officers died when their helicopter crashed during the crisis. On 23 May 2006 a Greek and a Turkish F-16 collided south of Rhodes near Karpathos while Greek pilots were intercepting a Turkish reconnaissance flight. The Greek pilot, Kostas Iliakis, was killed; the Turkish pilot ejected and was rescued.

Each interception also costs fuel, flight hours and wear on aircraft, at a time when Greece was in the middle of a severe economic crisis. Greek analysts argued that money spent on constant mock dogfights could have gone to other defence needs.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Where things stand

Incidents rose and fell over the following years, often tracking the wider political mood between Athens and Ankara. In December 2023 the two governments signed a declaration on friendly relations and good-neighbourliness and reopened regular dialogue, and airspace incidents reportedly fell sharply during the calmer period that followed. The underlying legal disputes over airspace width, territorial waters and maritime zones remain unresolved.

The 2015 comparison still makes a fair point about consistency. A country that treats a 17-second incursion as grounds to shoot down a jet invites the question of how it would react if its neighbour applied the same standard to it.

Sources: Wikipedia: 2015 Russian Sukhoi Su-24 shootdown; Wikipedia: Aegean dispute; Statista: Turkey violated Greek airspace 2,244 times in 2014 (November 2015); Neos Kosmos on the Tsipras tweets (December 2015); Wikipedia: Greece–Turkey relations; original report by RT (November 2015). Photo: Yiorgos Karahalis / Reuters.

Related:

Labels:

Facebook ↗WhatsApp ↗

COMMENTS

BLOGGER