Foreign policy: Greece no longer wants Ukrainian drones on its coasts

If Greek-Ukrainian relations had already been battered by disputes over the joint maritime drone program, today’s declaration brings them to a new low point. It finds its origins in the week of May 4 to 10, 2026, when a fisherman sailing along the island of Lefkada, which is one of the very touristy Ionian Islands, unearths at the bottom of a cave a maritime drone whose engines were still working.

His examination, carried out in a naval base near Athens, confirmed that it was the so-called “Cossack Mamai” model, named in homage to a Ukrainian national hero. In addition, it seemed to be in mission configuration, which excludes the hypothesis of a malfunction having led the craft to be lost and then grounded. According to several sources, this drone is only one of many devices of this type currently flying over the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

A ghost hunt that increasingly disturbs Athens

 

If Kyiv is deploying so much effort in this region, it is with the objective of countering the “shadow fleet”: this group of vessels, which circumvents Western sanctions to transport goods coming from Moscow, provides the country with crucial foreign exchange to maintain its war effort. The Ukrainian government had also warned its Greek counterpart that any building identified as such would be a priority target. However, part of this fleet would be made up of Greek ships: last March, one of them was hit by a drone in the port of Novorossiysk, while it was loading its Russian cargo.

At present, Kyiv said it had no information on the drone. “There is no evidence that it belongs to Ukrainian operators. We are open to cooperation with the Greek side to clarify the circumstances of the incident, if relevant requests from them exist,” Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said last Tuesday.

 

A report which prompted the authorities to react

 

A preliminary document on the inspection of the vehicle by the Greek Joint Chiefs of Staff has already been submitted to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has yet to decide on the course of action. The two main scenarios considered consider that the drone was either dropped in the area by a commercial ship, or it was launched from a Ukrainian base in Misrata, in western Libya. The possibility of one of these devices hitting an oil tanker or even a passenger ship by mistake greatly worries Athens, which fears a human but also ecological disaster (the oil spill linked to the sinking of the Agia Zoni II in 2017 remains present in the memories).

A message will therefore be sent to Kyiv, asking it to withdraw all its drones from the country’s coasts. However, this warning does not mean a change in policy according to diplomatic sources: faced with Turkey’s own territorial claims in the Aegean Sea, Athens remains opposed in all circumstances to the forced modification of borders. Direct contact between Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not excluded.