Perhaps it was fate, or a kind of punditry destiny, that the idea of Russian troops marching into Ukraine would trigger evocations of Greek mythology some 1,200 miles south, in Athens — as well as the inevitable comparisons to Turkey.

Writing in an outlet of the Athenian daily Ta Nea, journalist George Pavlopoulos declares that international law is nonexistent and that President Putin’s incursion has opened wide the “bag of Aeolus,” a reference to the ancient Greek keeper of the winds. The less obvious point is that not only is this eruption not the first to upset the apple cart of perceived postwar Continental comity, but that Mr. Putin’s playbook takes a page or two from assorted bellicose behaviors in recent decades — here’s looking at you, Ankara. 

Mr. Pavlopoulos places Turkey, which like Greece is a NATO member state, in the same boat as Russia on account of its invasion of Cyprus in July 1974. He asserts, with considerable accuracy, that the Turkish leadership invoked the ostensibly abused rights of the ethnic Turks living in Cyprus as well as Turkey’s status as one of the island’s guarantor powers to seize control of a third of it.

Neither America nor the United Kingdom, which retains two Sovereign Base Areas on the strategic island, took any decisive action as Turkey essentially reshuffled the Eastern Mediterranean deck and left the island divided, as it is to this day. 

Against the backdrop of Turkey’s unilateral recognition of a breakaway, rump Turkish state in the country’s north — the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (where, incidentally, there are no British bases) — the Greek reporter slams Ankara’s condemnation of Moscow’s recognition of the two Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as hypocritical. 

The contention that international law is essentially meaningless was not exactly shared by center-right Greek daily Kathimerini (which has a partnership with the non-center-right New York Times), whose Ukraine coverage includes the almost studiously anodyne headline, “‘Mitsotakis on Russian actions: They undermine international stability.”  The Greek prime minister said that Moscow’s unilateral recognition of the “independence” of Donetsk and Luhansk “blatantly violates international law, Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the Minsk agreements.”

Worth noting, there were Greeks living in Crimea in antiquity and other Greek communities in parts of what is present-day southern Ukraine for centuries, as well as a sizable one currently in Mariupol’, on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov. The region was a major supplier of grain to the city-state of Athens in ancient times.