site.btaUPDATED GERB Urges Ukraine Aid to Be Public, Opposition Doubts PM’s, Defence Minister’s Statements

Aid to Ukraine should be public, according to MP Hristo Gadzhev of GERB-UDF. The opposition said that they did not believe Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov and Defence Minister Todor Tagarev, who were given a hearing in Parliament in connection with a visit to and a conference on Ukraine. 

Under Bulgarian legislation, sending troops to another country should be sanctioned by Parliament. GERB-UDF will not support sending troops to Ukraine, said Gadzhev, who chairs the parliamentary defence committee after the hearing of the prime minister and the defence minister in Parliament. The statement signed in Ukraine by the two prime ministers is in line with the parliament's decisions on Ukraine military aid, there is nothing different, he stressed. 

Of a letter of intent signed last October between the defence ministries of Bulgaria and Ukraine, Gadzhev said all remains in the sphere of good intentions. 

Vazrazhdane leader Kostadin Kostadinov said that the prime minister and the defence minister are lying and that Bulgaria will become involved in the war in Ukraine “because of people who serve foreign interests”. 

“Today's hearing showed that closed circles discuss topics that affect the fate of entire nations and Bulgaria participated actively, but we learn about the results from foreign prime ministers,” said Atanas Zafirov from BSP for Bulgaria.  According to the left-wing party, there is only one way out - the resignation of this government and "stopping another national catastrophe". 

There Is Such a People floor leader Toshko Yordanov said that the defence minister should be accurate in his statements in order not to cause panic.

In the corridors of Parliament, GERB leader Boyko Borissov said "he is following closely" an investigation in "some very serious German media outlets" about Bulgaria being among the countries which have sent the most weapons to Ukraine, and said investigative journalist Christo Grozev told Free Europe on Wednesday that "Bulgaria is being investigated for money laundering through weapons that are sent to Ukraine". "Just remember how the four-party government [lead by Continue the Change, December 2021 - August 2022] kept saying that not a single cartridge had been sent to Ukraine!" 

In the Free Europe interview Borissov mentioned, Grozev talks about what he calls "Bulgaria's secret support for Ukraine" and what consequences that has had. He said: "That secret support, which was needed so that [Socialist leader] Kornelia Ninova could deny before her electorate – which is expected to be against supplying weapons to Ukraine - that we were selling to Ukraine, have resulted in having that huge wagon of intermediates which increased the cost of supplies to Ukraine many times and drained their budget much faster. In other words, Bulgaria was helping, denied it was doing so, created a negative image for itself in the civilized world, and at the same time, intermediaries, some of them serving politicians who kept secret the support for Ukraine, or gave them a cut of the commissions, became real rich."

Grozev also said that Bulgarian journalists have shared with him information about corruption in the Bulgarian arms supply to Ukraine and that said intermediaries have connections with the Bulgarian Socialist Party. „Bulgarian colleagues have shared with me such data and, to me, it was very convincing. I hope these colleagues and the Bulgarian counter-corruption institutions would publish that very soon.“ 

He said further that the Ukrainian investigative bureau is investigating irregularities in transnational schemes for military supplies, including by players in Bulgaria.