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EU and NATO member Bulgaria, once Moscow’s closest satellite, has been moving away for years, albeit at a slow pace, from Russia’s pull. This process has been accelerated following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, the Kremlin can still count on an array of friendly politicians, spies, and a disinformation and propaganda network to further its interests in Sofia.
An unprecedented diplomatic row between Russia and Bulgaria as the latter plunged into a political crisis
By mid-summer, 2022 is already shaping up as one of the most turbulent years in the Bulgarian-Russian diplomacy.
Over 80 Russian diplomats have been expelled in the first seven months of the year, and 70 of them received a personae non grata status on June 28 - a memorable goodbye from outgoing PM Kiril Petkov, whose reformist cabinet was ousted by the opposition, and a way to kickstart his next election campaign by showing that he is firmly in the Western camp when it comes to sanctioning Russia. This comes after a number of exchanges between government officials and the Russian ambassador Eleonora Mitrofanova, and the severance of ties with Russia’s Gazprom after Sofia refused to pay for gas in rubles, as the Russian company had demanded. The latter may, however, turn to be a blessing for Bulgaria, as it revived ambitions to stop the economic dependency on Russia for good by being supplied with Azeri gas through a new interconnector with Greece. Also, batches of LNG were imported from the US.
The row with Moscow came as Russia invaded Ukraine and Bulgaria sought to give an answer to that which was, by no means an easy task, as the country was caught between the need to act in concert with its Western allies and, especially, the EU, Ukraine’s calls for help, and the opposition of those still clinging to the “brotherly” ties with Russia.
“There’s no faking it anymore that there’s no aggressor”, said on April 27 Deputy Prime Minister and Finance minister Assen Vassilev, co-leader of reformist We Continue the Change, during a widely watched press conference with PM Kiril Petkov who was about to travel to Ukraine and meet Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“It’s a different feeling when you see with your own eyes three rockets flying 200 meters from you - it’s madness to feel safe in that situation”, said Petkov on May 2 during a TV interview after returning from his meeting Zelensky where the two agreed on Bulgarian factories repairing Ukraine’s heavy weapons and the biggest town on the Black Sea, Varna, becoming a hub for Ukraine’s grain exports. “We can choose Orban’s Hungary way of being soft to Russia and call it a “military operation” but there’s another way: to say it clearly that rockets shouldn’t crash into residential blocks, with kids' toys and notebooks being the only thing left in the pile.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (R) and Prime Minister of Bulgaria Kiril Petkov (L) shake hands as they attend their meeting in Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine, 28 April 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/SERGEY DOLZHENKO
However, despite the prime minister’s firm statements, the cabinet was divided in its response to the war as the ruling coalition included not only the parties determined to maintain a line common with that of Bulgaria’s Western partners, but also the pro-Kremlin Bulgarian Socialist Party. Both the Socialists and President Rumen Radev, who over the years has made several statements that were favorable to Russia, became increasingly skeptical even about Bulgaria’s condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s politics.
The recent events might be described as Bulgaria’s biggest row with Russia and most significant attempt to move away from Moscow’s sphere of influence since the late XIXth century.
The Z line across the parliament
As recent mandate holders We Continue the Change and their closest allies Democratic Bulgaria demonstrate a pro-EU, pro-West outlook, without defining themselves clearly as centre-right or centre-left, the other parties often shapeshift in their politics, depending on the situation.
Most of the parties in the current parliament have, continuously or in key moments, worked for Russia’s interests.
The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) is largely seen as the unreformed successor of the former Bulgarian Communist Party and its repressive State Security network. Its pro-Kremlin positions are not always upfront but they tend to clearly show when Russia’s interests might be hurt: the party has taken conservative stances on human rights issues, is vehemently against Bulgaria sending increased aid to Ukraine and has heavily criticised the expulsions of Russian diplomats from the country.
GERB, headed by former PM Boyko Borissov, and the dominant player on the local political scene from 2009 to early 2021, holds a centre-right and pro-EU position but is responsible for Bulgaria’s longtime gas dependency on Russia. During Borissov’s governance, contracts with Azerbaijan for gas deliveries never came into effect and were restarted only when Petkov took office. Borissov kept Bulgaria close to Russia’s Gazprom and that remained the case until Sofia’s row with Russia’s gas giant in May. On July 1, local media reported that Russia-owned oil company Lukoil has paid taxes to Bulgaria for the first time since 2007, meaning no tax was collected from the company while GERB was in office as well as in the last two years of the 2005-2009 coalition of NDSV, headed by former monarch Simeon II, Movement for Rights and Freedoms and Bulgarian Socialist Party.
In 2020, GERB, along with the now defunct nationalist group United Patriots, imposed the much-discussed veto on North Macedonia’s EU ascension talks, a move that also benefited Russia by delaying the EU enlargement in the Balkans.
On July 1, Borissov called the expulsion an amateurish move by Petkov as it appeared single-handed, but supported the decision.
Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), a party with a liberal makeover, is focused on the Turkish diaspora in the country, however, without having an upfront ethnic profile. In 2016, Turkish authorities banned founder and then-leader Ahmed Dogan, who is of Turkish descent, to enter the country because he was blacklisted as a Russian agent. The party features one of the most known and controversial Bulgarian oligarchs - Delyan Peevski.
The Movement for Rights and Freedoms and GERB were also formerly in favor of a controversial practice, repeatedly criticized by the European Commission – the issuing of the so-called golden passports. After Cyprus scrapped the scheme in 2020, Bulgaria and Malta were alone among the European Union’s 27 members still offering citizenship to foreigners in exchange for investments (one million leva, or roughly half a million euros).
According to local media reports, 96 golden passports have been issued, 40 per cent of them to Russian citizens. On February 17, the parliament unanimously voted to scrap the scheme. Lawyer Ivan Todorov, close to Peevski, has facilitated the golden passports to Russian businessmen, according to bird.bg
There’s Such a People, headed by hugely popular entertainer Slavi Trifonov and his screenwriter Toshko Yordanov, stood as an anti-establishment party, which similarly to We Continue the Change and Democratic Bulgaria wanted to reform Bulgaria after GERB’s era. Following various questionable moves in 2021, the party entered Petkov’s four way coalition and has been acting as an in-house opposition ever since. On June 8, the party left abruptly the coalition and thus broke its parliamentary majority; shortly after that, a no-confidence vote ousted Petkov’s cabinet. Some senior members left the party claiming it had been “overtaken by the mafia”. Prime minister Kiril Petkov claimed There’s Such People’s role was actually to greenlight state fund schemes to illegal private firms, mainly in the field of infrastructure and on the Bulgarian-Turkish border - they turned against the coalition when We Continue the Change decided to investigate these links.
The There’s Such a People party also features financier Lyubomir Karimanski, who was the party’s failed nomination to head the Bulgarian National Bank. Karimanski’s biography includes being a director of Investbank and according to bird.bg, during his time there, in 2014 offshore company Solidstar Worldwide LTD has made transactions through the bank to Castlefront L.P. which according to the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has been used for money laundering by Russian individuals.
Revival is Bulgaria’s most outspoken pro-Kremlin party (curiously, also the only one with a profile in Russia’s main social network - Vkontakte). Leader Kostadin Kostadinov is openly chasing a leading role in Bulgaria’s near future politics, has clearly stated that he would like to see the country out of the EU and the NATO zones and is supporting and sharing statements by the Russian ambassador. Russian flags are a permanent presence at Revival’s demonstrations and since the start of the war Kostadinov is standing firmly against Bulgaria sending any kind of help to Ukraine. Revival debuted in the parliament last November, after they gathered a huge voter turnout because of their nationwide protests denying the pandemic, the need of health measures as well as the need of vaccination certificates.
Positioning of Bulgaria's main political parties vis-à-vis Russia. Artboard: Veridica/Iulian Preda
On June 30, Alpha Research issued a poll according to which the voters of Bulgarian Socialist Party have the biggest percentage of affinity to Russia - 56 per cent in comparison to zero in Democratic Bulgaria and 14 per cent in Petkov’s We Continue the Change. Naturally, Revival also draws voters who are pro-Kremlin: 49. 39 per cent of them have responded that Bulgaria should always side with the EU, 23 per cent think Bulgarian politics should align with the Kremlin, 28 are not sure on which side they are, 3 have not responded.
The president and the defence ministers that used to work with NATO and are now against helping Ukraine
As Veridica noted around Radev’s last Presidential campaign, his personality is not yet fixed in the public consciousness: initially not known to the general public beyond his career as a commander in the Bulgarian Air Force, Radev won in 2016 as an independent candidate supported by the Bulgarian Socialist Party against less likable runners and tuned with the desire of opposition minded voters to break GERB’s hegemony by choosing a President who could challenge Borissov’s status quo. A year later Radev was against sanctions on Russia, explaining that this would hurt both Russia and the EU's economies.
During the 2020-2021 anti-establishment protests, Radev openly supported the movement, which drew thousands of people from all political specters. The President called the ruling coalition of GERB and nationalist alliance United Patriots “mafia”. His outspokenness increased his reputation, as well as his 2021 interim cabinet’s reformist stance. The caretaker cabinet was headed by his defence advisor Stefan Yanev, who was unknown to the public and initially showed a reasonable and balanced approach. However, by the end of 2021 Yanev made it increasingly clear that he saw any increase of NATO troops level in the region as a potential cause for increasing tensions, and he currently is one of the most vocal supporters of the idea of Bulgaria being “neutral” in the conflict.
Since the elections in November, Yanev, back then friendly with Petkov and We Continue the Change, served as a Minister of Defence. His insistence on Bulgaria staying neutral and calling the war a “special operation” cost him his position: Petkov ousted him on March 1, stating: “I cannot have a defence minister who can’t say the word ‘war’ and prefers to call it an ‘operation”. In early May, Yanev announced a party called “Bulgarian Rise” which has the potential to draw votes both from the far-right (Revival), the center-right (There’s Such a Nation, often engaging in nationalist rhetoric, especially in regards of Bulgaria’s politics to North Macedonia) and the left (Bulgarian Socialist Party).
If Yanev’s Bulgarian Rise gets elected in the parliament in near future, the party will join Revival and Bulgarian Socialist Party as serving the Kremlin’s interests.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) gestures during his meeting with Bulgarian President Rumen Radev (L) during their bilateral meeting on the sideline of St. Petersburg Economic Forum SPIEF 2019 in St. Petersburg, Russia, 06 June 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE/YURI KOCHETKOV / POOL
Increasingly hostile to the coalition he initially endorsed, on May 1 Radev stated: “Don’t let charlatans drag you into the flames of war” and added “It’s our patriotic duty not to be part of this war. Every call for military intervention is a call for bloodshed”. Minister of Transport and member of the winning party Nickolay Sabev also threw some fuel in the fire, saying on May 2 that “It’s Radev that’s the charlatan” and describing the President as someone who “fakes being a democrat while his soul points East”.
Radev and Yanev share the similarity of being diplomatic in most situations and engaging in much more firm tone when Russia’s interests are challenged.
“It seems like Putin gets the opposite of what he wants: he wants less Western military around the borders, now there’s more, he wants to control the countries which rely on the Russian gas, now they’re getting more independent from it”, said during a TV interview on May 1 Dragomir Zakov, who was appointed Defence Minister after Yanev was shown the way out. Zakov, however, is also not keen on the idea of sending military aid to Ukraine, out of worry that Bulgaria’s capabilities are in a dire condition.
It’s also worth noting the paradox that three of the personalities against military aid – Radev, Yanev and Zakov – have had professional links with NATO. Radev has organized and conducted NATO trainings before entering politics, Yanev was a Head of the Transformation Department at the NATO Counter-Terrorism Center in Ankara between 2005-2007, Zakov has been Bulgaria’s permanent NATO representative since 2019.
“Russian espionage is very much at home in Bulgaria”
Longtime journalist, former TV host, book author and popular blogger Ivo Indzhev says that a lot of what currently motives Russia to meddle in Bulgaria’s affairs is the country indeed supplying Ukraine with weapons without officially saying so (an investigation by Capital from April 22 indicated this happens through Denmark, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, Slovenia, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Estonia) and also the production of an improved version of the Soviet AK-47. “Apart from that, the interest of Russian espionage in Bulgaria is focused on the creation of paramilitary organizations, with the direct participation of Russian instructors, as well as on creating political organizations with the aim of destabilizing Bulgarian’s position as an ally of the West.”
In his trilogy, “Liquid Friendship” [“Techna Drujba”], written between 2011-2015, he claims that Russia had invested 20 million euro in propaganda around the 2013 referendum, initiated by the Bulgarian Socialists Party, about whether a new nuclear plant should be created. 60 per cent voted with “yes” but the project about a new plant in Belene has been in slow development ever since; however, it remains an ambition of the Socialist Party to conclude the project at some point.
Indzhev sees Russia’s hand in several other events: such as creating panic around US energy company Chevron’s plans for shale gas drilling in Bulgaria in 2011-2012.
“From what I know, Russian espionage is very much at home in Bulgaria, it’s a regional hub for such activity”, Indzhev told Veridica. “The effect from the Russian propaganda is destructive. Because of this, many Bulgarians cannot make a difference between good and evil, the aggressor and the victim. Media in Bulgaria holds responsibility for this too.”
A woman shouts slogans as she holds the Bulgarian national flag during a rally against the production of shale gas in Sofia, Bulgaria, 14 January 2012. Photo: EPA/VASSIL DONEV
Inzhev sees the recent claims by MP Lena Borislavova of We Continue the Change of journalists, politicians and intellectuals receiving around 2000 euro per month to spread pro-Kremlin’s views as very possibly true. “The deep entrenchment of Russian spies here is so pervasive that some Russian commentators rightly scoff at the expulsion of the so-called diplomats from Bulgaria - it’s practically unnecessary due to the simple truth that Bulgaria can’t hold any secrets from Russia and that’s always been the case.”
In March 2021, the Prosecution initiated police raids which resulted in the detention of six people for espionage, including three from the Ministry of Defence.
On September 24, 2020, two Russian diplomats suspected of espionage on Bulgaria’s military were named personae non grata.
In January 2020 two Russian diplomats were expelled although Anatoliy Markov, Russia’s then-ambassador, complained that he was not officially informed about the charges.
Earlier, in September 2019, Nikolay Malinov, leader of a pro-Russian NGO, the Russophile National Movement, was charged with spying. At the same time, a former senior Russian intelligence officer, Leonid Reshetnikov, was barred from entering Bulgaria.
None of the people charged with espionage have received a sentence. Malinov is still active with his NGO.
In 2020, the Prosecution stopped the investigation on the Russia-linked case of poisoning of firearms dealer Emilian Gebrev, allegedly with the Novichok agent in April 2015, although this was never confirmed as the probes disappeared during tests in Finland. The case remains unsolved despite the fact that three Russian citizens who entered Bulgaria with fake names and counterfeited documents were suspected in the affair.
The war caused several more expulsions of Russian diplomats this spring but to some, that’s not nearly enough.
“Democratic Bulgaria” member Stefan Tafrov, a former MP and a former ambassador to UK, France, Malta and Italy, is calling for reducing the number of Russian diplomats; according to his estimations, they are around 112 at the moment. 70 of them got expelled on June 28.
He tells us that the growing discontent towards the attitude of Russian ambassador Eleonora Mitrofanova should be more openly challenged and he described Mitrofanova’s politics as arrogant. Mitrofanova has repeatedly insisted that many Bulgarians support Moscow. “The majority of the Bulgarian nation is against the anti-Russian rhetoric from the government about the special operation in Ukraine,” Mitrofanova told Russian TV channel Rossiya 24 on Monday and dismissed the We Continue the Change party as “clerks” to the EU.
Tafrov is adamant that the current crisis draws a line in the Russian-Bulgarian diplomacy and it might be a while before there’s further cooperation: “Until Putin’s regime is in power the relationship between Russia and Bulgaria will be frozen, kept at minimum, in case there’s need of consular protection”, Tafrov tells Veridica.
On March 31, without providing further information, PM Kiril Petkov voiced suspicions that Russian intelligence had worked against improving relations with North Macedonia over numerous historical disputes.
On June 30, in an interview with the Bulgarian National Television, Mitrofanova directly said that the pro-West attitude of Petkov is the reason he’s not in office any more. "If he had changed his rhetoric, he might have had a longer political future", she said, criticizing the expulsions.
The deep-rooted Russian meddling in Bulgaria and the brotherly nations narrative
New times call for different approaches in propaganda. “Russian influence in Bulgaria and its instruments and rhetoric have been changing through Bulgaria’s recent history”, longtime journalist, writer and political commentator Emilia Milcheva tells Veridica. In Milcheva’s view, Russian influence has changed in the 90’s in the way that it no longer lies that much on propaganda. Moscow rather relies on its economic leverages, especially on the energy market, and on contacts from the repressive former State Security agency of the totalitarian regime. The latter is a still controversial topic for Bulgaria as files of widely recognized personalities who served as agents - from politics to art - have been slowly uncovered, mostly after 2008.
However, pro-Russian voices and outright propaganda are present both on traditional and social media platforms, and they become more active and louder when the society’s opinion needs to be firmly on Russia’s side. “Ukraine is letting itself fall by its own hands”, states a website called pogled.info. Another one, durjavnik.bg, quotes statements by Chechen and pro-Putin leader Ramzan Kadirov. Popular radio host Peter Volgin openly supports the Kremlin on Bulgarian National Radio while marginal nationalist party Bulgarian Military Union has over 8 thousand subscribers in Telegram receiving constant updates about how Russia is “cleansing” the region and will stand strong against the “global elites”. Generic Facebook groups with names like “I love my mother” have been activated to spread propaganda in favor of the Kremlin and against the pro-Western government of PM Kiril Petkov and We Continue the Change (their changing names can be easily tracked by the public group history log). These are just some of the examples.
Data expert Nikola Tulechki of Factcheck.bg estimates that several hundred people are involved with spreading misinformation in Bulgaria. “Multi-level marketing schemes are drafting people with lower income, sometimes of elderly age. They are usually paid per comment and get a percentage if they manage to attach somebody else to the scheme”, Tulechki tells Veridica.
Milcheva says that despite Bulgaria breaking from the USSR’s sphere of influence in 1989, a lot of the Soviet rhetoric stayed in the public consciousness of the society – including the rhetoric about Russia as a brotherly nation to Bulgaria, a sort of a guarantor of Bulgaria’s identity because of the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-1878), ending with a win for Russia, which is seen as a major event in Bulgaria being reinstated as an independent country. In recent years and especially amid the invasion in Ukraine, the traditional March 3 celebrations for Bulgaria’s Liberation Day have been a point of heated discussions. There are growing feelings that Bulgaria should re-examine its view of Russia as a liberator and rather celebrate much more visibly the Unification Day, on September 6, which commemorates the unification of the Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia and the principality of Bulgaria in 1885, was a more important event. And while many see March 3 as a traditional celebration, it started being commemorated in 1978, when the country was still a Communist satellite of the USSR.
People wave a Red Army flag in front of the Red Army monument during Victory Day celebrations in Sofia, Bulgaria, 09 May 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/VASSIL DONEV
As the documentary movie “The Second Liberation” (2021) by director Svetoslav Ovcharov reminds, in the very first years of the totalitarian regime (1944-1989) Russophile sentiments started becoming part of the bigger story through propaganda efforts, starting from patriotic songs that were glorifying the USSR just as the soviets were taking away Bulgaria’s resources, including food, and later moving on to the state-controlled art and literature.
Milcheva tells Veridica that a lot of the narratives about Bulgaria and Russia being “bratushki” and part of a unified Slavic legacy, have been instilled in the public opinion, generation after generation. “Back then, after 1989, Russian influence relied on old models. In retrospect, even the anti-Russian and anti-communist rhetoric of the pro-West parties back in the day now appears somehow muted because in the 90’s one didn’t make the connections that some of the first [business] groups such as “Multigroup” [an investment company which in 1992 started gas company Overgas with Russia’s Gazprom, and was headed by tycoon Iliya Pavlov, killed in 2003] were instruments for backstage scheming to make Bulgaria economically unstable. Gazprom’s ambition to control all gas routes in Bulgaria during the governance of Jean Videnov [PM from Bulgarian Socialist Party, criticized for sending the country in an inflation in 1996-1997] was not something that challenged the society’s trust in Russia.”
Russian rhetoric returned during the accession to NATO and the plans to re-activate the power plant in Belene, with Vladimir Putin and Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov, back then a member of Bulgarian Socialist Party, meeting in 2008 to solidify their relationship.
“But the true propagandist bacchanalia started after 2014, along with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Kyiv’s Euromaidan movement and the initiation of the breakaway states of Donetsk and Lugansk”, says Milcheva. “If up until then, the Russian influence was over imposing some kind of neutrality in Bulgaria, following the occupation of Crimea, there were fully blown hybrid information wars.”
Conspiracy theories, false news cycles and their Russian connections
The part of Bulgaria media which is being critical to the state and the links between the oligarchy and people in power has long been suspecting links between conservative groups on social media and the spread of conspiracy theories and pro-Russia sentiments. In the last few years, several such theories caused a sort of a societal panic: in 2018 the so-called Istanbul Convention, a treaty on prevention of violence against women, caused protests by people fearing that the document imposes a “gender ideology” which will eradicate Bulgaria’s “national and traditional values” – a narrative which was supported by United Patriots group of nationalist parties, back then in a coalition with GERB and currently against any military involvement of Bulgaria in Ukraine, in different capacities. In a reaction much criticized by human rights activists, Bulgaria’s top court ruled that the convention actually violates Bulgaria’s constitution. The reason was that the convention’s definition of “gender” as a social construct “relativizes the borderline between the two sexes – male and female as biologically determined”.
This was followed by a conspiracy that Western (usually described as Norwegian) same-sex couples are preying on Bulgarian children to adopt them, also causing protests. The COVID-19 pandemic escalated the polarization in society and distrust in authority. As in other countries in the Balkan region, antivax sentiments in Bulgaria are spread mainly through both secret and open groups in Facebook (lately also Telegram), a system used as well to spread conspiracy theories, and fake news cycles – from anti vax rhetoric to hatred of LGTB “propaganda”, from fear that the national identity would be erased to claims overstating influence of personalities like George Soros and Bill Gates. The same social media groups and several media personalities who were skeptical of the EU, the vaccination campaign and the widening concepts of human rights, are now in tune with the Kremlin's version of events in Ukraine.
In late 2020-early 2021, the Bulgarian Socialist Party stated that they will support a mass inoculation only with the Russian made jab Sputnik V, socialist leader Kornelia Ninova never vaccinated and went through COVID-19 twice, while President Rumen Radev rarely commented on the pandemic at all and disclosed he’s inoculated in August 2021 only when he was pressured to answer a question on his vaccination status.
Pro-Kremlin ultranationalist party Revival did their election campaign in 2021 almost exclusively on protesting against vaccination certificates as a means to enter indoor establishments, while several individuals, on social media reported to be connected to marginal far-righters Bulgarian National Union, attacked a mobile vaccination center in Varna in September 2021. As of spring 2022, Bulgaria is still one of the countries with lowest vaccination rates, with little over 30 per cent inoculated.
“The events in Ukraine in 2014 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 were like detonators for false news cycles. Disinformation, especially in regards to the pandemic and the vaccination, found a fertile soil in Bulgaria”, says Milcheva. “Skepticism to the vaccination is acting as skepticism against science and West’s achievements. Russian propaganda obviously has big resources in Bulgaria, now famous to be the EU and NATO’s weak spot.”
Russian propaganda and disinformation in Bulgaria. Artboard: Veridica/Iulian Preda
She observes that a lot of the narratives running wild in the Russian media and through Kremlin’s channels quickly took hold in Bulgaria too, sometimes with a spin that’s relevant for the country’s context – like for example fake news around the recent release of sailors from a ship that was stranded in embattled Mariupol since the onset of the invasion which some reported to be blocked by Russian forces, others by Azov troops holding the crew hostage. Milcheva shares the sentiment that circulation of fake news as well as users posting pro-Kremlin opinions under news articles intensifies when a consensus, different from the Russian narratives, takes hold in the country.
Marginal far-right parties, such as the Bulgarian Military Union, who were previously engaged with criticizing the vaccination rollout, are now passionately taking Russia’s size in the war, with online posts mocking Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelensky or US president Joe Biden or boasting successes of the Russian army. A lot of the rhetoric has been mirrored in the Telegram channel of Bulgaria’s Russian embassy.
Minorities abroad are also vulnerable to Russian propaganda and Soviet nostalgia
On April 29, during his visit in Ukraine, Kiril Petkov met with representatives of the Bulgarian community. Bulgarians represent the fifth biggest minority group in Ukraine and estimations point to nearly 200,000 people of Bulgarian descent, most of them based in the region around Odessa.
Freelance journalist Dimiter Kenarov has long been interested in how minorities in South Ukraine are rationalizing the tension between the country and Russia, and why most of them, according to his personal observations, are, or were, on Putin’s side.
Kenarov has covered the events in Ukraine between 2013-2014, covered the annexation of Crimea and in 2022 traveled to the South-West part of the country, in the Budzhak region near Odessa, part of the historic region of Bessarabia.
He told Veridica that ethnic Bulgarians in Ukraine have long been chased by the uneasy feeling that they are in no one’s land. They are not so much pro-Putin out of passion for the Kremlin; they rather react to the fact that they never felt that the Ukrainian government was on their side. The state language laws on making Ukraine compulsory everywhere on the territory, adopted in January, has raised concerns for the protection of minority languages and according to Kenarov’s observations, this has not helped turning the ethnic Bulgarians on Kyiv’s side as many are eager to keep their traditions intact. “It’s not like people stopped supporting Putin overnight but the war did change some of the sentiments in the region - and I can imagine some are just not open in their biases right now.”
Much of what the pro-Russia Bulgarians think occupies the minds of the ethnic Bulgarians in Ukraine, with similar waves of nostalgia to the Soviet times when everybody could find a job. Poverty is a factor too, with people living in harder conditions than in North-West Bulgaria, EU’s poorest region.
“What is different is how locals in Bessarabia view Russia - they still see it as the Soviet Union, as a multinational entity that has some protective power rather than what Russia currently is”, Kenarov tells Veridica.
As support for Putin is going down, pro-Russian propaganda is being stepped up
Getting back to Bulgaria, all polling agencies indicate that since the start of the invasion, trust in Vladimir Putin has sharply dropped - from over 50 per cent in 2020, to 30 per cent in the first days of war, while 63 per cent are approving the sanctions on Russia.
A poll by Alpha Research from April 18, pointed to 25 per cent of the society which supports Putin, 15 per cent think that Bulgaria should ally with Russia and a huge gray zone of people who can be influenced either way - 38 per cent have responded that they’re not following the developments around the war too closely.
Half a year into the war, hesitant sentiments are remaining. On June 20, a Gallup International poll indicated that 59 percent are against the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine. 23 per cent support Putin’s politics, others are unsure about what is going on.
“Putin indeed lost support in Europe because his campaign in Ukraine has failed, not just from an informational point of view but also from a military point of view. The whole world is depicting him as the evil personified and naturally this changes how he is viewed here. Now those engaged with the propaganda are expected to tone down the importance of his failure”, says to Veridica data expert Nikola Tulechki, part of the team of the platform Factcheck.bg. “Since the beginning of the invasion, pretty much all resources have been focused on reports around the war.”
The team is engaged with verifying various doubtful news reports but also politicians’ statements which have turned out to be untrue (some of the recent examples was Bulgarian Socialist party leader Kornelia Ninova who claimed in a TV interview that Germany has made no contributions to the Ukrainian army or that Poland, who cut ties with Gazprom at the same time as Bulgaria, has agreed on paying in rubles after all). “Naturally, most of the disinformation is coming from Russian sources.”
Tulechki says there are some bits which have originated locally - like the fake news that EU and NATO have declined helping Bulgaria in covering damages caused by wildfires in 2007. There have been disinformation bits coming from Ukraine too - like Ukraine’s Armed Forces claiming that Google Maps has made Russian bases visible.
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Creating, disseminating and amplifying false news and misinformation. Artboard: Veridica/Iulian Preda
Tulechki sees the Russian rhetoric in Bulgaria and the way it transfers from chats and social media, to official media and statements from politicians, as a result of the work of “skilled propagandists”.
What would those skills require? “It’s after all a specific craft to make a huge portion of the society think in a certain way, identify with certain ideas. In modern context, this is done by an organization of people, rather than an individual. There are people who are tech-savvy and know how to develop social media pages and groups. There are people who know how psychology works and can formulate easily understood messages, analyze the feedback and see what is making waves and what isn’t. There are people working in IT, who can create numerous websites publishing the same content or navigate hundreds of social media profiles. All of this requires quite a lot of organizational skills as it’s not only about managing all layers but also paying trolls for publishing content”, Tulechki explains.
“What I think is the truly important question is what would the situation be in the worst case scenario, having in mind the resources invested in Russian propaganda - for example, what Bulgaria would look like if Putin succeeded in his aims and Yanukovich was still the President of Ukraine. And that’s a scary thought.”
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