site.btaRomanian Diplomatic Institute’s Mateescu: NATO Has Brought Bulgaria, Romania Closer Together

Dragos Mateescu, Head of the Directorate of Expert Analysis at the Romanian Diplomatic Institute and former commander of Romania's first NATO-interoperable company, told BTA on Friday that Bulgaria and Romania have become closer through NATO.

Mateescu guested at the BTA National Press Club in Bucharest, where he followed live the opening of a BTA exhibition titled "75 Years of NATO and 20 Years of Bulgaria in NATO". The event took place simultaneously at the Agency's national press clubs in the country and abroad.

"In 1991-2001, Bulgaria and Romania, together with other countries, joined a US-initiated project called Partnership for Peace. But back then, the two countries did not know each other yet. They had no contacts. We started to cooperate through NATO. The two armies did not start to cooperate under communism, or under the Warsaw Pact, but under NATO," Mateescu said.

"NATO is not a crisis management organization - crises are managed by the governments of individual member countries," he noted. "The idea of organizations like NATO is to help improve crisis management, in a focused manner, with support and expertise from individual member countries. NATO was not designed to address crises that take place in the territory of individual countries," Mateescu added.

"In the past, NATO did not have to handle a single war, and the world was wondering why it still existed. Now the world is realizing why NATO is there. Thank you, Mr Putin, for giving us the best reason to find an objective such as NATO, but also to enlarge this organization and turn the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. There has been threat after threat in the Baltics as the gas pipelines were destroyed. The same applies to the Black Sea. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, Russia maintains the momentum of its aggression against Ukraine, NATO would enlarge into the Caspian region. The Alliance has already enlarged southward and westward. I wouldn't be surprised if it would enlarge northward, including to Ukraine," Mateescu said.