For sober-minded people, the assessment of what is happening can hardly be clearer. Today Ukraine is the name of our common endangered freedom. If we do not support Ukraine today against the Kremlin's aggression, the next steps of the revived great-power imperialism will be Moldova, the Baltics, Bulgaria... All this has already happened - and more than once. Every empire is based on an ambition for expansion - in its claim to "universe". But for the Russian Empire, expansion, the subjugation of new and new territories and peoples is almost the only meaning of its existence. Violence, barbarity and plunder - this is the fate of every nation, on whose doorstep the Kremlin's conquering ambition has come.
This was warned on "Facebook" by Ognyan Minchev.
Russia has special requirements for its security. Only this border is secure, which is guarded by Russian troops on both sides. Russia has unlimited historical rights to rule others. It has the "right" to access "warm seas". It has the "right" to realize the "Third Rome", running over everything and everyone on the way to the second and first Rome. No one is safe from being included in the list of territories and peoples belonging to the "natural sphere of influence" of Moscow. And we know this better than anyone else - with the exception of Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians...
In Bulgaria, history is not taught. More precisely, a strange ideological version of historical mythology is taught, which places Russia - the most serious obstacle to the construction of a modern national state in Bulgaria - as the best friend and "brother" of the Bulgarians. It is true that we gave Moscow writing and culture. It is true that as a result of a Russo-Turkish war, the Bulgarian state was revived and began to walk the path of European modernity. It is also true that there is and will be no greater opponent of Bulgarian independence than Russia.
At the end of the 19th century, Stefan Stambolov parried the Russian ambition to conquer Bulgaria and incorporate it into the Russian empire. He did so well that we received a half-century reprieve from Russian imperial pressure... Until 1944 came. When Moscow, under the rule of the most inhumane ideology in human history - Bolshevism (rivaled only by Nazism) - ran over Bulgaria and destroyed the Bulgarian state... The Bulgarian state that we cannot restore to this day...
That is why now, in the third decade of the 21st century, we continue to talk about large-scale corruption, about an energy monopoly, about venal leaders and institutions that reduce Bulgaria to a pariah of Europe. Because even today - 30 years after the collapse of Soviet communism - we are part of Putin's colonial quasi-empire - Gazprom - Lukoil... For three decades after 1989, we have paid tens of billions in colonial tax to the metropolis of Moscow. Regardless of the fact that we can be members of NATO and the EU. Because the money from the EU still goes into the pockets of the same oligarchy, which is a derivative of Moscow.
There is a growing number of people in Bulgaria who are increasingly angry with Europe and the West. They are intoxicated by the increasingly intense great-power propaganda - a hybrid war that the Kremlin has been waging for more than a decade, paying for an ever-increasing share of the Bulgarian media market with a small part of the money it robs from us through oil, gas and systemic corruption. A growing number of Bulgarians believe this hybrid over-manipulation, convincing people that Europe and the West are "robbing" Bulgaria. How? Probably by giving it EU funds and vast markets...
Several generations live in today's Bulgaria, socialized after 1989, who do not know Russia, do not know the Russian language, have no life experience related to the "charms" of the Russian rule of Bulgaria through the communist clique in the second half of the 20th century. These generations - led like blind men by the Russian fifth column with its cops, media mouthpieces, venal politicians and bought oligarchs - are able not only to believe in the mythology of the "Eurasian paradise". They are able to let go of Russian control over Bulgaria, totally deceived and misled about the realities of life in the East and the West. Life is nowhere a paradise. But there are places where it is much poorer, less free and without prospects than in the rest of the world. And Eurasia under the rule of the great power empire is such a space - of poverty, dictatorship and arbitrariness.
Bulgaria is still a free country due to the fact that it managed to enter the civilized world with the efforts of generations who knew and remembered communism and Russian rule. If we do not value this freedom and do not protect the freedom - our own and that of other nations around us, we will face a new slavery, a new subjugation, another crushing of identity and perspective. If we do not protect Ukraine today, we will not be able to protect ourselves tomorrow.