A senior aide in the European Parliament is calling out Brussels directly, saying the EU's refusal to confront Turkey ov...

A senior aide in the European Parliament is calling out Brussels directly, saying the EU's refusal to confront Turkey over its occupation of Cyprus amounts to cowardice wrapped in diplomatic language. Emmanouil Koulas, head of office to Greek MEP Afroditi Latinopoulou and board member of the Patriots for Europe Foundation, gave a sharp interview to The European Conservative after EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas visited Ankara on July 1 and publicly praised Erdogan as a leader "making a significant contribution to protecting NATO's eastern flank." Koulas argued that Kallas had no need to flatter Erdogan to discuss shared interests, and that the choice to do so tells Greek and Cypriot voters exactly where they rank on Brussels' priority list: somewhere below pipeline deals and NATO photo ops. On Cyprus, Koulas was unsparing. Turkey invaded a sovereign EU member state in 1974 and has never left, he said. Thirty-six percent of Cyprus remains behind Turkish tanks and a puppet administration recognized by no country other than Turkey. Ankara has spent decades altering the north's demographics through settler transfers, stripping Greek Cypriot families of property they still legally own, and using Varosha as a bargaining chip. Brussels files it under "the Cyprus issue" and moves on, he said, because Turkey holds two levers over Europe: the migration tap and a NATO seat nobody wants to lose. Koulas, a descendant of Pontic Greek genocide survivors, also pointed to what he called a pattern in what Brussels chooses to ignore. MEP Latinopoulou has filed a resolution on the Pontic Genocide, in which 353,000 Greeks were killed by the same Ottoman regime in the same years as the Armenian Genocide, nearly every year in the European Parliament. Each time, the Foreign Affairs Committee quietly lets it expire without a vote, he said. The EU formally recognized the Armenian Genocide years ago. The Pontic case gets buried in committee to avoid objecting Ankara. On the Aegean, Koulas described Turkey's Mavi Vatan doctrine as a map with Greek islands already colored as future Turkish territory, taught in Turkish naval academies as doctrine rather than theory. Turkish jets c...