analysis by Vasil Vassilev –

author and host of the TV show „Don’t be afraid!“

In the Bulgarian parliament they insist that we do – cost, but at any cost to be included among the suppliers of arms to Ukraine. The prime minister even went to Kiev to justify to Zelensky that we have not yet joined the enemies of Russia. But let the Ukrainian President be in no doubt – we have been with him, we will give him weapons to beat the Russians, we are not afraid of them, we will put them in their place and so on. The whole visit and the atmosphere around it was not so much to show support for Kiev, but to demonstrate hostility towards Russia.

Why was it, what did the Russians do to you, did they decide to take back the liberation or are you planning to send troops to Ukraine?

The short answer is: The rulers have apparently taken it upon themselves to destroy any hint of friendship and goodwill the Russians have for us. To make them look at us not as friends and brothers, but as enemies who cannot rely on Russian support in fateful moments.

If that was the short answer, the in-depth answer is very complex and, I fear, extremely unpleasant for us. Let us try to look for it.

In the scale of Russian values and vices, treachery figures as the nastiest human trait. Tolstoy says: When you have been betrayed it is like having your arms broken. You can forgive, but you can no longer embrace. And according to Cyrus Bulychoff, traitors are always punished more severely than open enemies. The ungrateful approach them in the cliffs. And for 30 years Bulgarian democratic politicians have been making frantic efforts to convince the Russians that there is no more ungrateful and treacherous people than us. They want to tell them that Moscow made a big mistake with the Liberation, that we did not want it, but they forced it on us.

Here, for example, Stoyan Ganev, once foreign minister and then head of the cabinet of former Tsar Simeon II, went to sue the Soviet Union and began to turn the Russians against us – the Bulgarians.

Sergei Stanishev, a prominent fruit of the Bulgarian-Soviet friendship, stopped the South Stream gas pipeline, did what he could to block the Belene project and permanently soured relations with Russia. The fearful Plevneliev, who did not dare to say who had freed us from Turkish rule, kept looking, poor man, to annoy Moscow. I will never forget his sour face when he shook hands with Putin. The current dickheads, on the other hand, cackled with glee at the sanctions and insisted we implement them first, to show how much we loathed the Russians. Transport Minister Sabev was the first in Europe to ban Russian planes from our airspace and the first to close Bulgarian ports to Russian ships. Tightwad, it’s going to burst.

Deputy Prime Minister Assen Vassilev took up arms. He threatened that if someone declares war on us, he should be ready to meet our retaliatory strike. Ole-le! Guess who that Somebody is! When war comes to our doorstep, we will meet it and repel the aggressor, the brave minister threatened. Not to mention the contribution of the numerous petty bastards, foreign henchmen and monument destroyers to the inculcation of lasting hostility among the Russians towards the Bulgarian people. This is also the reason for the pressure to sell arms to Kiev. These weapons will do nothing to help Zelensky.

We don’t have them, and even if we send the remnants of our former fighting glory, they will be destroyed by the Russians as soon as they enter Ukrainian territory. The purpose of the pressure was to get bloodied in the war, to turn out to be the one you gave a knife to defend yourself and he stuck it in your hand. Will it help you more when you get into trouble again? No, of course not.

Fine, don’t love Russia, your business, I may not love it either, but why would you set it up to hate and despise us. What good does it do us to obliterate an age-old friendship? Why this humiliating put-down, this obsession with pleasing the West by demonstrating hatred of its adversaries, by compatibility our liberators?

Because Russia is the only great power that has an interest in the existence of an independent Bulgaria. It proved it with the Liberation, with the repayment of our debt to the Sultan after the Unification, with the preservation of our territorial integrity after the Second World War, and with the industrialization and training of our army afterwards. The only one!

Unlike other powers, such as England, whose policy has always been against the Bulgarian national interest – ever since the Crimean War in 1853, their opposition to the War of Liberation, the Treaty of Berlin, the battles of Doiran, the barbaric bombing of Sofia during World War II, and the efforts to dismember Bulgaria among its neighbors after the capitulation of Hitler’s Germany.

Winston Churchill even sent his son Randolph to Tito to advise him, among other things, how post-war Yugoslavia could use Macedonia to defeat Bulgaria. Those lessons bear poisonous fruit to this day. The United States was more sympathetic to Bulgaria, but after 1941 it solidarized with the British line.

London is the brightest example, but a number of other European capitals are not more honest in their attitude towards Bulgaria.

May 2, 2022, „Don’t be afraid!“