Updated | Euro area leaders getting tired of 'Greece's games'

It’s been a week of crunch talks for Greece and its creditors, and every day brought with it hopes of an agreement which would no sooner be crushed as everyone went back to the negotiation table in an attempt to draft a deal appeasing both sides.

There’s no end in sight.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, attending an EU Summit that has so far focused on the Greek crisis, admitted that “it will come down to the wire”.

“Negotiations are getting tougher. We want Greece to remain in the European Union. We will allow flexibility but we cannot give what we don’t have,” he said.

“We have a patient who owes us money and is on life support … we need the patient to live.”

Asked whether there were any member states that favoured a Grexit, Muscat says “yes” but didn’t name any countries.

While on the one hand there “is strong resolve” for Greece to remain in the Euro area, “the impossible can’t be made possible”.

“There is the realization that time is almost up and it is clear that a certain level of distrust is on the rise. There are member states that have had enough of these games … proposals that come in at the last minute … It’s a question of who blinks first but the euro area has now had enough.”

A third Eurogroup meeting – in five days – ended with no deal reached. Frustrated finance ministers may not have spelled out the words, but a new meeting scheduled for Saturday can make or break Greece’s future within the euro area.

“We were told that we’ll be meeting on Saturday, whether there is an agreement or not. How do you interpret it? I interpret it as the end of the line,” Finance Minister Edward Scicluna says.

Above all, the Maltese minister speaks about the lack of trust that exists between the Greek government and the creditors.

“With Ireland and Portugal it was a different story because we managed to achieve results, also because there was an element of trust by both sides. In this case there is none … they see us as ruthless.”

In trying to depict a picture of the situation, Scicluna explains that the ministers were seen as the “bad cop” whilst the heads of state and government were treated as the “good cop”. “They tried to reach deals where they failed with the ministers … they played this game for far too long and the prime ministers were telling their ministers that they wanted results.”

Indeed, Thursday's summit saw Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras trying his luck once again with the EU leaders and put forward his own proposals. The move did not go down will the heads of state and governments who insist that negotiations should be held at a ministerial level.

This was the first time that the finance ministers got an opportunity to see documents pertaining to the positions of both creditors and Greece, until they realized that the documents were a watered-down version of the memorandum of understanding that had originally found opposition by a number of ministers.

The creditors felt that the Greek proposals were “too soft”, talking about plans to transform deficit into surplus while presenting different scenarios that all showed a steady reduction in debt.

“It is no longer about hard-headedness. That is over and they know it too … they know that now it’s the abyss of a default,” Scicluna says, adding that there were little proposals on stimulating growth.