Just hours before the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is expected to deliver a stern rebuke to the Turkish president’s spurious claims about Greece’s treatment of refugees, Athens has accused Ankara of orchestrating a migrant push at Greece’s northeastern land border with Turkey. 

One day after President Erdogan attacked Greece’s generally unblemished record on illegal immigration, Greece on Wednesday thwarted the entry of an estimated 1,500 migrants into its territory from the Turkish side of the border, immediately east of the Evros River.

In comments made on Greece’s Skai TV on Thursday morning, the Greek minister of the interior, Takis Theodorikakos, said, “There obviously exists some kind of organized plan by Turkey; in most cases, [the migrants] are brought [to the border] in Turkish gendarmerie vehicles.” He added, “You can’t call that spontaneous.”

Greece maintains a heavy police and border guard presence along its 120-mile-long northern border with Turkey, which separates the Greek region of Western Thrace from East Thrace in Turkey. Most of the border is formed by the Evros River, but in places where it does not there is a high steel border fence. 

Most of the attempted crossings in the north are by water. In the past, most refugees have come from countries including Syria and Afghanistan, and are only using Turkey as a crossroads before attempting to enter the European Union.

The greater question is to what extent Turkey is using the refugees. Athens has accused Ankara of orchestrating migrant caravans in the past, but Wednesday’s incident marked an escalation in the number of illegal migrants attempting to cross the northern border, to a level not seen since the winter of 2020. Attempts by migrants to reach Greek islands by sea tend to be more dramatic and garner more international media attention, and in fact at the UN Mr. Erdogan said, “Greeks tyrannize refugees in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean.” 

Yet by virtually every credible account, the refugees who depart the Turkish coast in makeshift boats do so either with Turkish connivance or willful unconcern. 

Following Mr. Ergogan’s speech, Greece’s foreign minister, Nikos Dendias, also at New York, said that Turkey is “instrumentalizing the issue of migration, endangering tens of thousands of lives,” and “comes here to accuse Greece of crimes against humanity when in fact it is using false data that has been discredited for over 10 days.”

Mr. Dendias, for good measure, hammered back at Mr. Erdogan’s call for the international community to recognize the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. “The country that occupies foreign territory, including that of the Republic of Cyprus, comes here to talk about conditions of security and co-operation in the Eastern Mediterranean,” he said. 

In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mitsotakis said that Turkey has been “weaponizing migrants, very openly and very publicly,” for the last two years “by trying to encourage them, to send them to the Greek border, trying to push them to Europe.” He also said that Greece has “rescued tens of thousands of people who were in danger at sea,” and that “we defend our borders as we have an obligation to do, but we also respect fundamental rights.”

“We don’t need another source of geopolitical instability in the Eastern Mediterranean when we are waging war against Russia and trying to support Ukraine,” he also said. He added, tellingly, that “challenging the sovereignty of a NATO ally is obviously unacceptable” and that it is “not going to be tolerated by Greece, and it basically shows Turkey as a country that is no longer part of what we usually call, the Western alliance.”

Although Messrs. Mitsotakis and Erdogan attended the same reception hosted by President Biden at New York this week, Greek media reported that the Greek and Turkish leaders did not speak once, or even look at each other. In his interview with Bloomberg, though, Mr. Mitsotakis hinted at some verbal drama to come at Turtle Bay: “I will have the opportunity to respond to President Erdogan when I deliver my speech on Friday,” he said.