Greece’s need for debt relief, and the refugee and migrant crisis, dominated talks at a meeting yesterday (30.9) between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias and US Secretary of State John Kerry. The discussion also focused on the Cyprus issue, the FYROM name, developments in Ukraine and Syria, and energy.

Speaking on the same day at a high-level UN event on refugee and migrant crisis, Tsipras called for foreign policy choices and specific actions that will help resolve conflicts in the countries which create massive flows of refugees, and proposed a three-prong approach to resolving the issue of migrants and refugees arriving in Greece, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a banquet held at the Greek Consulate General in New York, the Greek premier met with representatives of the Greek-American community, who he described as "the best ambassadors for Hellenism in the US". "The Greek government has found far more open ears [here] than in Brussels for the need of a fair resolution to the crisis and a necessary reduction of the unbearable and unsustainable public debt that has accumulated all those years", Tsipras said.