Bulgaria Angers Russia Expelling Diplomats for Spying

Russia's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday accused Bulgaria of deliberately harming bilateral relations by expelling two Russian diplomats suspected of espionage.

"We see this as a deliberate attempt to harm constructive Russian-Bulgarian cooperation," the Kremlin said in a press release on September 24.

The Russian embassy in Sofia described prosecution accusations as baseless and said no evidence of spying had been offered.

The two diplomats, named on Bulgarian National Television as Sergei Nikolashkin and Vadim Bikov, were given 72 hours to pack and leave.

They are accused of having spied on Bulgaria's military since 2016, including supplying the Kremlin with information on how it obtained its fighter aircrafts.

"Their goal was to transfer the collected information, including official and state secrets, to Russian military intelligence in Moscow," the prosecution said on Tuesday.

"With the expulsion of the two Russian diplomats, Bulgaria has entered the list of countries that inflate unproven spy scandals against Russia," the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Leonid Slutsky, responded, as quoted by RIA Novosti.

The expulsions recall a similar case from January 24 when Bulgaria declared two other Russian diplomats personae non grata. That was preceded by the charging of Nikolay Malinov, leader of a pro-Russian NGO, the Russophile National Movement, with spying in September 2019.

At the same time, a former senior Russian intelligence officer, Leonid Reshetnikov, was barred from entering Bulgaria.

The spy charges have caused splits in Bulgarian politics. President Rumen Radev, who won the 2016 elections with the support of Bulgarian Socialist Party, called attempts to link him to...