“The ink is not quite dry” on the letter of approval for the sale of F-16s by the US to Turkey, and the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to have remembered his “old self” and resumed inflammatory statements against of Greece.

As SKAI’s correspondent in Istanbul, Manolis Kostidis, reports, during his speech about the candidate mayors of Izmir, Erdogan referred, among other things, to issues concerning the history of the neighbor.

“Our struggle did not end with the expulsion of the enemy from our lands, throwing them into the sea in Smyrna 100 years ago” he said adding that the regions of Marmara and the Aegean, including Smyrna, are the lands where the first seeds were planted, the first foundations and the first steps of their millennial existence.

In any case, these statements are not only an expression of his satisfaction for the approval of the sale by the US, but possibly also function as a response to the criticisms of the Turkish opposition, which claims that the country receives much less from the US than Greece as the F-35s are clearly more advanced fighter aircraft than the F-16s.

It is recalled that Turkey was a co-producer country of the F-35 and had joined the relevant program about 15 years ago.

Today, if it had remained in this program, it would have had at least 30 boats.

However, the data changed due to the wrong handling of the government, as the opposition emphasizes.

However, Turkey’s satisfaction is not only related to the acquisition of 40 F-16s and the modernization of the other 79, since the country’s air force had huge needs for spare parts.

The Turkish president indicated yesterday that for the maintenance and repairs needed by the F-16s, many spare parts will be released from the USA and Canada.