Ankara came 'close to red lines,' Kotzias tells Skai in interview

Turkey has "come close" to overstepping Greece's "red lines," Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias told Skai in an interview aired on Tuesday night, providing the example of an incident last February when a Turkish coast guard vessel rammed a Greek coast guard patrol boat off the Imia islets in the Aegean Sea. 

Greece's "calm and composed" manner may have averted unpleasant developments in Greek-Turkish relations, Kotzias told Kathimerini's executive editor Alexis Papachelas on Skai TV's "Istories" program. 

"If we didn't have a calm and composed approach from the Greek side, no one can say where this could have led," Kotzias said in regard to the incident in February off Imia, an area disputed by Ankara and over which the two countries came to the brink of war in 1996.

"In such cases you either respond with bravado and bluster or you continue with efforts to appease,"...