Turkey urged to take back refugees

EU will also push Ankara to drastically reduce huge flow of migrants into the bloc

European leaders will push Turkey at a summit on Monday to agree to "large-scale" deportations of economic migrants from Greece, as EU chief Donald Tusk said he sees the first hints of a resolution to the migrant crisis.

With a fresh surge expected in the warmer spring weather, the European Union's 28 leaders are pinning much of their hopes for reducing the chaos on new commitments from Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

The EU will also push Ankara to drastically reduce the huge flow of migrants into Europe, as Turkey is the launchpad for most of the more than one million refugees and migrants who have come to the continent since early 2015.

On Saturday, European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramapoulos said Greece - already struggling with a buildup of 30,000 migrants - was expected to receive "another 100,000" by the end of March.

But lingering tensions flared when Turkish police seized an opposition newspaper at the weekend and Brussels warned Ankara it had to respect media freedom in its decadelong bid for EU membership - also a topic in the migrant talks.

Tusk, the European Council president and summit host, said in his invitation letter that success depended largely on securing Turkey's agreement at the summit for the "large-scale" readmission from Greece of economic migrants who do not qualify as refugees.

Model of smugglers

"It would effectively break the business model of the smugglers," Tusk said when he also raised the idea on Thursday in Ankara with Davutoglu.

Brussels has unveiled a plan for saving the passport-free Schengen zone, which has been jeopardized by several countries closing their borders to stop the huge influx of people from Syria and elsewhere.

"For the first time since the beginning of the migration crisis, I can see a European consensus emerging," Tusk said in his letter.

Following their lunch with Davutoglu in Brussels, EU leaders are to meet by themselves.

The EU said Turkey has made progress toward implementing a cooperation-for-aid deal clinched in November but added that too many people were still heading from Turkey to Greece, the main entry point to Europe.

The European Commission, the EU executive body, said in a report that the daily average of irregular arrivals in February amounted to 1,943, which is "high" for a winter month.

In the report to EU summit participants, the commission said encouragingly that Ankara on Feb 26 approved 859 readmission requests from Greece.