Hellenic Coast Guard

Odyssey searched for approximately 14 hours before resuming its voyage.

The Greek Coast Guard recovered her conscious body and brought her ashore.

Passengers on board tell us that the captain announced she was being treated for hypothermia.

The incident also forced Odyssey of the Seas to cancel its scheduled call to Naples today.

Technology can improve awareness, but institutions decide whether awareness becomes action.

The Hellenic Coast Guard sits at the point where sovereignty, migration, maritime security, law enforcement, and operational readiness meet.

What does the modernization of the Hellenic Coast Guard reveal about Greece's institutional capacity to manage borders, migration, maritime security, and operational pressure in the Aegean?

So the ongoing procurement plan for the Hellenic Coast Guard, backed by a three hundred and thirty million allocation budget for the procurement of eighteen new offshore patrol and, uh, fast interceptor vessels, reveals a new wholesome strategic effort to enhance Greece's capability to manage escalating, uh, gray zone confrontations and border security.

At the core of this modernization program mandates the construction of large offshore patrol vessels with a length exceeding eighty meters.

So all of these, uh, requirements include larger and structurally hardened, heavily armed vessels driven by real world operational pressure of a sub-threshold maritime warfare in the Eastern Aegean, wins-- which means basically all of those threats, crises, and fait accomplis that Turkey is trying to impose that fall below the conventional threshold, threshold of open warfare.

So they belong in this gray zone conflict area, whether there is no openly declared war, but yet there is a lot of active and kinetic actions being taken that are rather unconventional and unorthodox.

For example, the harassment of Greek, uh, fishing boats, all kinds of ramming attacks, for example, against Hellenic Coast Guard vessels by larger Turkish Coast Guard crafts.

But 7,000 people were arriving every day, and there were no lifeguards.

And the officials, the Greek Coast Guard and Frontex, which your European listeners will know is the border patrol for Europe.

had not really put in place a rescue operation.

It was all about border control.

A million migrants crossed its islands and its land frontier with Turkey between 2015 and 2019.

The Greek Coast Guard was overwhelmed.

The islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos turned into open-air camps where 40,000 people were warehoused in spaces designed for a fraction of that.

Per capita living space inside the Maria camp on Lesbos fell below two square meters per person at the peak.

According to Greek news outlet 2.0, Weimar, citing the Athens Macedonian News Agency, AMNA.

Greek Coast Guard and Frontex vessels, along with aircraft and a Coast Guard helicopter, are taking part in a search and rescue operation coordinated by Greece's Unified Search and Rescue Coordination Center.

51 migrants have been rescued and are safe aboard vessels involved in the operation, while One person was retrieved dead from the water.

Rescued migrants, where are they? They are expected to be transferred to migrant reception centers in Paleokra and Iagilene on the Greek islands of Crete.