Vladimir Mitev: Bulgaria is part of both Western policy towards Ukraine and Western policy towards Russia

Mihai Isac, Karadeniz Press, 26 March 2025

The Bridge of Friendship, 26 March 2025

Vladimir Mitev is a Bulgarian Romanian-speaking journalist and founder of the blog The Bridge of Friendship. You can subscribe to his articles in English at the following link (newsletter in Substack).

Bulgaria has organized a large number of elections in the coming years and its coalition government includes both pro-European and pro-Russian elements. How do you see the current political stability and what are the main domestic challenges facing the government in 2025?

With a new party, Greatness, entering parliament, the recount of votes from the 27 October 2024 elections in 2204 polling stations suggests at first glance that the parliamentary majority is only 121 MPs in the 240-seat parliament. Except that the government also enjoys the backing of the DPS – A New Beginning, the party of influential businessman and politician Delian Peevski. Peevski has repeatedly said he will support the government. That is why, at this stage, it seems stable, despite the many passions and dramas that Bulgarian politicians generate on a daily basis.

One of the main intrigues surrounding the leadership of Zhelyazkov’s cabinet is whether Bulgaria will receive a positive convergence report in July 2025 so that it can join the eurozone on 1 January 2026. At present, there are constant scandals and news reports suggesting that the government is wavering or that there are doubts about joining the eurozone. This sense of uncertainty is probably also linked to the dynamic international situation inside and outside the EU, to which Bulgarian politicians must respond if the winds blowing in the region change direction. We see, for example, that France has a very active role to play in relations with Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, while the current Bulgarian government is dominated by GERB – the Bulgarian partner of the European People’s Party, which generally has strong ties with Germany.

The 2025 budget has been approved. It seeks to continue the policy of increasing wages and pensions. However, while in some sectors – e.g. in the security sector – the pay rise is 50%, for other public sector employees – e.g. in the national media – it is only 5%. This disparity in the treatment of different groups of citizens can cause resentment among those who feel discriminated against.

The Zhelyazkov cabinet tries to balance different interests. Internationally, for example, it is close to both the European Commission and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Domestically, on the other hand, he is looking for ways to secure funding under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by carrying out the appropriate reforms, while at the same time showing a desire not to close down the coal industry.

Although legislative work has been difficult in recent years, not many reforms have been made and there have been many elections, wages and pensions have increased significantly. In other words, while the international press is watching the Bulgarian political crisis and drama, people are living better today than ever before. Bulgaria demonstrates that such a development model exists.

Given Bulgaria’s historical ties with Russia and its commitments to NATO and the EU, how would you characterize current relations between Bulgaria and Russia? Is pro-Russian influence growing in Bulgarian politics or is Sofia aligning itself more with Western security and energy policies?

In Romania, ever since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been an opinion about Bulgarians that we are almost all Russian agents here…

I do not dispute that there are people in Bulgaria who are Russophiles. But there are also Russophobes, as well as Germanophiles, Francophiles, Turcophiles, etc. In fact, Bulgaria joined NATO and the EU together with Romania and, as in Romania, this membership changes certain balances in Bulgarian society, limiting the influence of forces outside these integration structures.

I will give examples of this.

Bulgaria was crucial to Ukraine’s survival during the first months of the Russian invasion, a fact recognized by the German press and by Politico. Despite the fact that one of the members of the Bulgarian government at the time – that of Kiril Petkov – was the Bulgarian Socialist Party, traditionally considered to be Russophile, Bulgaria supplied arms and fuel to Ukraine, which allowed it to keep several territories under its control and to stop the Russian advance after the first Russian successes on the front. The Lukoil Neftochim refinery in Burgas was a key supplier of diesel oil to the Ukrainian army, with some estimates suggesting that in the early months of the war 40% of fuel supplies to Ukraine came from Bulgaria.

These are just a few of the many examples where the ambiguity or apparent hesitation and nuance of Bulgarian leaders on certain international issues actually lead to the right decisions from the perspective of its Western partners.

Instead of canceling Bulgarians for their alleged Russophilia, Romanians can be more effective in their regional relations if they develop concepts and experience with which to understand Bulgarian contradictions and realities. Such experience can provide Romanians with the resources to have a more sophisticated and realistic understanding of the relations between the different elements of West and East in our region. Because we see that concepts such as West, East, Russia do not refer to single, homogenized and unified realities, but must be thought and understood in the plural.

I believe that Bulgarian-Russian relations are a function of the dynamics of relations between the West and Russia. There are forces in the West that have traditionally sought cooperation with Russia – for example, the American Republicans of the MAGA tendency, Netanyahu’s Israel (which went to the May 9 celebrations in Red Square when EU leaders boycotted the event)… Countries like Austria, Hungary and Turkey have elements of a bridge to Russia. At the same time, Britain, France and other Weimar Plus countries are interested in supporting Ukraine.

Bulgaria has close relations with countries that want rapprochement with Russia, as well as with those that want to oppose it. Therefore, Bulgaria is part of both Western policy towards Ukraine and Western policy towards Russia.

When we talk about the energy sector, after the start of the war in Ukraine, Bulgaria completed a gas interconnector with Greece, through which natural gas began to flow not only to Bulgaria, but also to Romania, the Republic of Moldova and other countries, after the transit route through Ukraine for Russian gas was blocked. Although Azeri gas reaching Bulgaria and continuing northwards is suspected to be partly Russian, non-Russian gas can now be imported into the region via gas terminals in Greece.

Bulgaria is working on a project by the US company Westinghouse to build two new units at the Kozloduy nuclear power plant. In addition, the nuclear fuel for units 5 and 6 currently in operation could now be not only Russian but also American and French.

In other words, as the popular Bulgarian security expert Yordan Bozhilov said last year – after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, diversification is taking place in Bulgaria’s energy sector.

Despite the scandal in which Bulgarian citizens have been convicted in the UK for spying for Russia, and despite the existing reality that there are Bulgarian elites and people’s people entering the world through the door that the Russian world opens, I cannot recall a case in which the intelligence services of Western partners have said that they do not trust their Bulgarian counterparts. On the contrary, we have heard regularly over the years from American and other security experts that their Bulgarian counterparts can be trusted.

However, I must emphasize that Bulgarians – at least those I know – seek moderation, balance and restraint. Extreme positions for and against someone do not seem to me to be characteristic of Bulgarians. If Romanians could develop a more refined and sophisticated way of thinking about the West and the East, it seems to me that they could develop a greater bond of trust with Bulgarians, who generally avoid extreme positions on political and geopolitical issues and who are first and foremost Europhiles and only then belong to a Europe of various shades – French, German, British, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.

Against the backdrop of rising tensions in the Black Sea region, there is talk of creating a single NATO fleet in the Black Sea. How is this proposal being received in Sofia? Is Bulgaria likely to support or oppose a stronger NATO presence in the region, given its geopolitical and economic interests?

This proposal has been linked to an unpleasant moment in Romanian-Bulgarian relations in 2016, when Bulgaria refused at the last moment to sign the NATO Black Sea flotilla agreement, given that the then Romanian president was in Sofia to sign it. Shortly after this moment, which negatively marked Romanian-Bulgarian relations in the Boiko Borisov era, the failed coup d’état in Turkiye broke out, after which Ankara reoriented its foreign policy towards greater cooperation with Russia.

In a different international and regional context, a joint Romanian-Bulgarian-Turkish naval mission to clear the Black Sea of floating mines was launched in 2024, almost two years after the start of the war in Ukraine. This cooperation is not along NATO lines. It was described by security specialist Yordan Bozhilov as follows:

“This mission is something completely different from the flotilla. The flotilla was not limited to a certain activity. It was to be a naval component that would be part of NATO. This operation that has now been set up has the sole and exclusive purpose of searching for and destroying free-floating mines in the Black Sea. It has a very clearly defined mandate. It does not target any particular country, it does not extend to other naval activities.”

It seems to me that Bulgaria, like Romania and other countries in the region, is waiting to see how the US sees the future of NATO and its presence in the region. In the context of the doubts expressed by Donald Trump and representatives of his administration about NATO and the validity of Article 5 on collective defense, it is quite interesting how Bulgaria sees the growing presence of Western Europe in the region. For example, Dimitar Gardev, chairman of the parliamentary committee for European affairs and control of EU funds, said in an interview with Bulgarian National Radio that Bulgaria should not join the formats discussed for supporting Ukraine with the participation of the UK or Turkey, but should rely on pan-European solutions.

Relations between Bulgaria and North Macedonia are strained because of historical and identity disputes. Has there been any progress in improving these relations, in particular with regard to North Macedonia’s EU accession process? What role does Bulgaria see in shaping the European future of Northern Macedonia and the Western Balkans? What are Bulgaria’s main priorities for the Western Balkans and how does it balance its national interests with the EU enlargement agenda?

The path for the start of EU accession negotiations for North Macedonia was opened with the adoption in Sofia and Skopje of the so-called French proposal to overcome the Bulgarian veto on the start of these negotiations. According to this formula, North Macedonia must define Bulgarians as a constitutional people in its constitution. At the moment, North Macedonia is not preparing these constitutional changes.

However, I believe that relations between Bulgarians and Macedonians are better than they seem. There are Bulgarian intellectuals who enjoy interest and friendships in North Macedonia. There are pro-Bulgarian media that are published in Macedonian. Bulgaria has friends in North Macedonia, just as North Macedonia has friends in Bulgaria.

There are examples of how the Orbanists in both countries interact with each other and have a common interest in maintaining tensions in bilateral relations so that North Macedonia stays away from the EU. Also, the pro-European forces in both countries know each other well. For example, Vessela Tcherneva – adviser to former Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, played an important role in the acceptance of the French proposal in both countries. And her analyses or interviews with her have often made it into the Macedonian press over the years.

I am not convinced that Bulgarian national interests are opposed to European interests in the Western Balkans and that a balance between the two is needed. Both the line advocated by the European Commission and the line that feels solidarity with Viktor Orbán are both Bulgarian and European. To a certain extent, Bulgaria has two hands in the Western Balkans and it seems that each of them acts independently of the other. But I do not see a Bulgarian interest that is not European, and even Viktor Orbán’s supporters are supporters of the European state that, until recently, had appointed the European enlargement commissioner for the region.

Bulgaria supports the Euro-Atlantic path in the Western Balkans and has its own contribution to make, both in terms of security there and in overcoming existing conflicts. Bulgaria is able to talk to all countries in the region. The tragedy at the Pulse club in Koceani, where a fire killed 59 people and injured more than 150, showed that the political elites and the Bulgarian people can organize quickly and commit to act when needed in the region.

Bulgaria and Romania are partners in the European Union and NATO, with interests in the wider community in the Black Sea region, the Balkans and energy security. In this area, do you think Sofia and Bucharest are willing to step up foreign policy cooperation? What are the main areas in which the two countries as a whole are willing to agree on a coordinated approach to the various disputes of regional influence?

I believe that Bulgarians and Romanians need to get to know each other, increase their trust and develop their capacity to grow in connectivity. When they manage to develop such relationships, they will automatically discover the potential that their joint actions can realize.

I am aware of collaborations between NGOs of a similar profile on both sides. There are media partnerships at European level – for example between Hotnews and Mediapool. Defense and security cooperation is going well – again, because our partners make sure that there are no unpleasant surprises in it.

The challenge is for the Romanian-Bulgarian relations to deepen – that is, to become more mainstream, more fashionable, and to have what I call ‘Romanian-Bulgarian populism’ – the participation of the peoples and citizens in it, which complements the work of the political elites and gives it depth. It seems to me that in northern Bulgaria and southern Romania there is a growing awareness that we have common interests.

As Bulgarians and Romanians rediscover the depth of their relations, I believe that the new spirit will also manifest itself in the Republic of Moldova, where the Bulgarian community is somewhat encapsulated and the politicians of the Romanian-speaking majority are not interested in engaging with the few percent of the population who are Bulgarians and Gagauz. More trust between Bulgarians and Romanians should mean more trust between their brothers in Bessarabia.

As far as the Western Balkans are concerned, I still see no sign of joint Bulgarian-Romanian action.

The Ilinden Uprising of 1903 in Macedonia was the work of Bulgarians and Vlachs and led to the establishment of the Krushevo Republic. Today, Krushevo is a city where the Vlach language is official. And Bulgarian Wikipedia has dozens of articles on Macedonian Vlachs, some of whom, like the Bulgarian-identified people of Vardar Macedonia, were subject to repression after Yugoslavia regained control of the area after World War II.

These are signs that Bulgarians, Macedonians and Vlachs have shared a common fate over the years. Bulgaria and Romania might be bolder to build on the traditional ties between the Western Balkan communities and not seek to divide loyalties between Sofia or Bucharest. Of course, more sophisticated Bulgarian-Romanian coordination requires trust, and for our countries to develop a more active and ambitious foreign policy.

Photo: Vladimir Mitev (source: YouTube)

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