Cyrpus, the small country tied up in crises in Gaza and Ukraine

“The memories came back,” Constantinos Kombos, the foreign minister of Cyprus, told me, gesturing to his own nation’s history 50 years ago when Turkey launched an invasion and occupation of Cypriot territory that remains to this day. “We are a victim of invasion and aggression, too.”

The 1974 Turkish intervention followed a period of political turbulence and communal strife in the former British colony, which led to Turkey justifying its move on the basis of defending Turkish Cypriots. A third of the Mediterranean island — roughly, the bulk of its north — has splintered off into a breakaway republic that is only recognized by Ankara and patrolled by tens of thousands of Turkish troops. Some 200,000 people were displaced.

Kombos’s government hopes to revive a political process that could lead to the reunification of the island, but diplomacy faces major roadblocks, with the Turkish side insisting that the political entity in the north be recognized as an independent state — a determination rejected by Cyprus, the European Union, the United Nations and the United States.

“There is no point in negotiating with a party that does not accept our sovereignty,” the president of North Cyprus told reporters earlier this week.

Kombos linked recognition of the Turkish-influenced entity with the Kremlin’s efforts to normalize its illegal annexation of Ukrainian regions under Russian occupation. “We will be legalizing an act of aggression just because time has passed,” he told me during an interview in Washington, where he was visiting. “And this relates directly to what’s happening in Ukraine.”

The Cypriot position on Russia has undergone a striking shift. For years, Cyprus was a favored destination for Russian interests, business and otherwise. Russian oligarchs channeled their wealth through Cypriot banks and other ventures, winning a financial beachhead within the European Union — Cyprus became a full member state in 2004 — no matter some of the shadowy origins of their funds. Those dealings were stemmed over the past decade in the wake of the 2013 European debt crisis, with Cyprus severing business ties with tens of thousands of Russians and suspending myriad bank accounts.

Kombos acknowledged E.U. sanctions on Russia have been hard for Cyprus, cutting off significant flows of Russian tourists as well as marking a rupture in a long history of connections to Moscow. “This is a ‘back to the future’ moment,” he told me, referring to the return of Cold War-era polarization. But he argued that the Cypriot alignment with other E.U. nations on Ukraine “puts us clearly now on the right side of this divide.”

Over the weekend, Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides will be among the many world leaders attending a Ukraine-led peace conference in Switzerland. Kombos said the gathering would mark a useful moment for E.U. nations and their counterparts to start thinking through how the war “ends.”

Closer to home, the challenge is as thorny. Christodoulides came to power last year in part through an electoral campaign vowing to bring new momentum to the negotiations over the “Cyprus problem,” which have been stalled since 2017. Kombos said the “negative absolute” position of the Turkish side makes things difficult, but he hopes steady diplomacy can prevail, and that the enticement of political incentives from the European Union to Turkey may help create a diplomatic opening.

Absent progress, the lone “frozen conflict” — though Kombos rejects the notion that it’s “frozen,” pointing to provocative Turkish troop deployments — in the European Union may prove all the more intractable. In the north, foreign passport holders from countries such as Israel, Russia and Iran have been buying up real estate, including properties that technically still belong to Greek Cypriots displaced since 1974. “What has been a very complex problem has become even more complex because we are adding layers to our complexity,” Kombos said.

“The prospects of a solution that everyone can accept are gradually fading,” declared U.N. Secretary General António Guterres earlier this year.

But Cyprus’s top diplomat wants observers of his country to see beyond its conflicted status. He points to a thriving start-up economy and the multinational partnerships across the Mediterranean that may eventually drive the cultivation of lucrative undersea gas deposits off Cyprus’s coast, tapping resources that could boost Europe’s energy autonomy. And Kombos also spotlighted the pivotal role Cyprus has played as a hub for humanitarian assistance and logistical operations during the war in Gaza.

Though the U.S.-built maritime pier into Gaza has faced severe weather- and security-related setbacks in enabling the delivery of humanitarian aid, Cyprus helped facilitate the transfer of goods from its shores. Kombos, moreover, added to the chorus of international officials urging Israel to unblock land-based access to the embattled territory.

“We have been calling for the opening of the land crossings because that’s the more efficient way to do it,” Kombos said. “But in the meantime, we offer to the international community an option that it didn’t have before.”

The current crisis, he added, has been a boon for U.S.-Cypriot ties, “because perhaps for the first time we have showcased that we can be useful.” Cyprus, said Kombos, who meets Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday, is “in between the Middle East and Europe and we have an advantage of being able to talk to everyone in a way that is honest and transparent and predictable.”

At a fraught, volatile moment, that matters. “One thing we can predict for certain in our part of the world is that we will have another crisis and then another crisis and then another,” he told me.