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Bulgaria, Russia Repel Each Other's Diplomats
One day after Bulgaria decided to expel three Russian diplomats over an alleged spying scandal, Russia retaliated Monday by demanding three Bulgarian diplomats to leave its land.
News reports said that Bulgaria's ambassador in Moscow Ilian Vassilev was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry and told that the three diplomats must leave by Friday for "activity inconsistent with diplomatic status."
The Russian embassy in Sofia, in a statement faxed to local media, denounced Bulgaria's deportation of the three Russians as bewildered and accused Sofia of staging an "anti-Russian campaign" in recent months. It warned that the move would inevitably hurt deeply bilateral relations.
The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry on Sunday asked Russia to recall three of its diplomats, suspected of being involved in a spying scandal, within a week or they will be declared personae non grata.
The row erupted in the wake of the arrests of a retired senior Bulgarian army officer and the chief of a Defense Ministry secret archive last week.
Bulgaria's counter-intelligence National Security Service arrested retired Colonel Yani Yanev, a former military intelligence chief, and Lilyana Gesheva, head of the military intelligence archive, on charges that they handed Bulgarian military secrets to a foreign embassy in Sofia.
Bulgarian authorities would not name the country for which the two allegedly spied, but local news media said Yanev was captured red-handed while trying to hand a secret Bulgarian intelligence report about the situation in the Balkans to a Russian diplomat through the fence of the Russian embassy.
Gesheva is charged with supplying Yanev, her former boss, with classified materials.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nadezhda Mihailova sent a letter Monday to her Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, to explain the incident.
"The most well-meant gesture toward our Russian partners is that we did not disclose the concrete facts about the illegal activities of diplomats of the Russian Federation on the basis of which the Bulgarian state took the respective decision," the Foreign Ministry's media office said.
"I would like to stress that this was done not against but in the name of the good and civilized Bulgarian-Russian relations," Mihailova wrote in the letter.
Prime Minister Ivan Kostov echoed her on the issue when asked about it at a meeting on Monday evening with the citizens of Pazardjik, southern Bulgaria.
He said he knew about the motives for which the diplomats were asked to leave Bulgaria.
"We made a gesture to the Russian side by resorting to the lesser measure. Because there is another one, more drastic -- to expel them, and we had serious grounds to do so," Kostov said.
The second well-meant gesture, according to Kostov, was that Bulgaria did not publicize the reasons. "If we disclose the reasons, this will have a very unfavorable effect on the Bulgarian- Russian state relations," Kostov said.
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