Greece and Turkey bowed to EU pressure on Monday and locked horns in the first direct talks in nearly five years over their explosive eastern Mediterranean standoff.
The three-and-a-half hour meeting ended without a breakthrough after the uneasy NATO neighbours' gunboats collided in August as their dispute over energy and borders threatened to spiral out of control.
The Istanbul talks came as the Greek and French defence ministers signed a diplomatically-charged deal in Athens for Greece's purchase of 18 Rafale fighter jets.
Greek navy ships taking part in a military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean last Ausgust. Photo: GREEK DEFENCE MINISTRY / Handout
Greek Defence Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos said the 2.5-billion-euro ($3 billion) purchase "sends a clear message in several directions" -- particularly Ankara.
But Turkish President Recep Erdogan has spent the past few months trying to cool the rhetoric and repair damaged relations with Europe in the face of a potentially more hostile US administration under President Joe Biden.
A Turkish diplomatic source told AFP that the exploratory talks ended with an agreement to hold the next round in Athens at an undisclosed date.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (L) is welcomed by European Council President Charles Michel before their meeting in Brussels on Friday. Turkey's EU accession talks have been stalled for years Photo: POOL / JOHANNA GERON
"A solution to all problems... is possible and we have full will to this end," Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin tweeted as the talks broke up.
Athens and Ankara held 60 rounds of talks between 2002 and 2016 without resolving a dispute that has lingered for much of the past century and nearly led to war in 1996.
Tensions between Greece and Turkey were stoked in August when Ankara sent the seismic research vessel 'Oruc Reis', accompanied by Turkish naval ships ships, into waters off the Greek island of Kastellorizo in the eastern Mediterranean Photo: TURKISH DEFENCE MINISTRY / Handout
Hostilities flared anew last year when Ankara sent a research ship accompanied by a navy flotilla into waters near the Turkish shore, which Greece claims with EU support.
Turkey is furious that Greece is using its vast web of islands to lay claim to huge swathes of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.
The two sides cite a range of decades-old treaties and international agreements to support their conflicting claims.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (L) is welcomed by European Council President Charles Michel before their meeting in Brussels on Friday. Turkey's EU accession talks have been stalled for years Photo: POOL / JOHANNA GERON
NATO has set up a hotline to stave off a military conflict and Germany has spearheaded efforts to solve the dispute through negotiations that do not further isolate the mercurial Erdogan.
These will not be easy as Athens and Ankara clashed over their agenda last week.
Athens wants to limit the discussions -- attended by retired Greek diplomat Pavlos Apostolidis and Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal as well as Kalin -- to continental shelf borders and the size of exclusive economic zones.
But Ankara also accuses Athens of illegally stationing troops on some of its islands and wants to discuss aerial zones -- a separate dispute that saw a Greek pilot killed when his jet collided with a Turkish one in 2006.
Anthony Skinner of Britain's Verisk Maplecroft risk consultancy said the talks stood a chance of "gaining some momentum over the coming months, given Erdogan's current overtures to EU-27 states and domestic economic pressures."
But he added that Erdogan was unlikely to fundamentally change his hawkish foreign policy stance.
"Turkey has worked hard to establish a strong hand in the eastern Mediterranean, one which it is unlikely to relinquish," Skinner told AFP.
The Istanbul meeting came during a sudden spurt in diplomatic contacts aimed at thawing an ever deeper chill in relations that have frozen EU accession talks Turkey began in 2005.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was in Brussels for meetings with top EU officials last week and Ankara hopes for a return visit by early March.
But EU chief Ursula von der Leyen remarked in a pointed tweet after the Cavusoglu meeting that talks needed to be accompanied by "credible gestures on the ground".
France has led EU condemnation of Turkey's military interventions in Syria and Libya as well as Erdogan's support for Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh war against Armenia last year.
The EU ultimately decided to draw up an expanded list of Turkish targets for sanctions last month.
