Defense industry ties with Egypt tightening
Aiming to boost Greece’s defense industry, Defense Minister Nikos Dendias announced the deepening of cooperation with Egypt during his visit to Cairo on Tuesday where he had contacts with his counterpart, General Mohamed Zaki.
Dendias also stated that he weighed the issue of Egyptian Chinooks and their possible deployment in July and August 2024 in order to enhance the country’s air assets during the firefighting season, as was done last summer.
The visit by Dendias came amid efforts already under way to create an ecosystem of defense innovation with intensive discussions between Athens and its partners in recent months.
Dendias was also the first foreign official to be received, earlier, by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi shortly after his re-election in Egypt’s elections last weekend.
Dendias recalled that in 2020, as foreign minister, he had signed with his counterpart Sameh Shoukry the agreement on the partial delimitation of exclusive economic zones between the two countries.
This agreement, he said, “is an example of the International Law of the Sea and has helped stability and security in the region,” he said, underlining “Egypt’s leading role in defending security and stability in our wider region, in the South-Eastern Mediterranean and in the Arab world, in a region where we, Greece, also play a stabilizing role.”
Dendias and Zaki also discussed the regional challenges and in particular the situation in the Gaza Strip and Libya, crises in which Cairo has a primary role.
The two sides also agreed to expand the annual program of military exercises, either bilaterally or through the framework of trilateral cooperation between Greece, Egypt and the Republic of Cyprus.
In a briefing after Dendias’ contacts with Sisi, Egypt’s presidential spokesman Ahmed Fahmy noted that he conveyed the congratulations of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for the election victory of the Egyptian president.
