Russian President Vladimir Putin will seek closer energy ties with Bulgaria during a visit to Sofia starting today, but faces protests over the former Soviet satellite state’s growing economic contacts with Moscow.
Putin will oversee the signing of several agreements and try to confirm the new European Union member state’s participation in a major gas pipeline project, seen as helping export monopoly Gazprom’s expansion drive in Southeast Europe.
Sofia will seal a deal with Atomstroyexport, controlled by Gazprom, to build the Balkan country’s planned new 4-billion-euro nuclear power plant, the Bulgarian government said.
Moscow and Sofia, which receives all of its gas and oil from Russia, will also sign an agreement to set up a project company for the construction of a long-delayed trans-Balkan pipeline to carry crude via Bulgaria to Greece.
The two sides will discuss the ambitious South Stream pipeline project, proposed by Gazprom and Italy’s Eni to carry Russian gas under the Black Sea to Europe via Bulgaria.
Analysts say South Stream is Gazprom’s challenge to the rival Nabucco pipeline scheme, which aims to supply Central Asian gas to the EU and is a key plank in Brussels’s plans to diversify gas supplies away from Russia. Fears about the EU’s heavy energy dependency on Russia have emerged after a political dispute between Moscow and Kiev in 2006 cut off exports via Ukraine. Russia supplies a quarter of the EU’s gas.
Bulgaria, torn between proving its EU credentials and maintaining its renewed ties with Russia, is eager to diversify its gas sources by being a partner in Nabucco but is also attracted by South Stream because of lucrative transit taxes. “The transit does not increase the Bulgarian economy’s dependency,” Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin told the daily Dnevnik this week in response to criticism at home that Bulgaria was placing its energy future entirely in Russian hands. “It would be a lack of foresight if we let all energy projects bypass us. We should look at our ties with Russia without much nervousness and political anxiety,” he added.
Kalfin and Economy Minister Petar Dimitrov, however, said Sofia was not in a hurry to sign a deal with Moscow about South Stream and that Bulgaria insisted on holding a majority stake in the pipelines to be laid on its territory.
Several Bulgarian non-government organizations plan rallies during Putin’s two-day visit to protest against Sofia’s expanding economic and energy ties with Moscow after relations nearly froze in the decade following the collapse of communism.
“No economic benefits could be justified if they come from a non-democratic country, which has been persistent in its attempts to dominate Bulgaria throughout its new history,” said Ivan Gruykin of civil society organization Spra-vedlivost.
Putin’s visit will also kick off the “Year of Russia” to mark the 130th anniversary of Bulgaria throwing off Ottoman Turk rule with Russian help. Bulgarians say they are still grateful to Russia, despite stagnant ties in the last decade.
Protests planned in Bulgaria
Bulgaria’s opposition parties and a number of non-governmental groups said yesterday they were planning demonstrations later this week to protest a two-day visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The right-wing opposition party, Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB), urged its supporters to gather this evening in a central park where the country’s first anti-communist demonstrations were held back in 1988.
The DSB argues that the number of major energy contracts being signed to coincide with Putin’s visit “will turn Bulgaria into a Trojan horse for Putin’s oligarchy in the EU.” Former right-wing Prime Minister Filip Dimitrov, now deputy chairman of parliament, urged the current Socialist Premier Sergei Stanishev to question the Russian leader about “the brutal violation of human rights by his regime.” Dimitrov has also invited one of Putin’s fiercest critics, Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, to visit Bulgaria next week.
Among the demonstrations being staged by non-governmental organizations, a small human rights group named after the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya will stage a sit-in on a central crossroads in Sofia under the slogan “Enough with Soviet domination.”
Tomorrow, a religious mass is to be held “for Bulgaria’s independence” at the monument of the victims of communism in Sofia. That will be followed by a march in the afternoon.
The various protests will be the first-ever demonstrations in Bulgaria against the visit of a visiting Russian leader. Ties between Moscow and Sofia were so close in Soviet times that Bulgaria’s communist dictator Todor Zhivkov even proposed joining the Soviet Union as its 16th republic. Putin’s two-day trip starting today is actually to mark the 130th anniversary of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, in which Russia freed Bulgaria from five centuries of Ottoman domination. Putin last visited Bulgaria in 2003, the 125th anniversary of the same war.
During the trip, Russia and Bulgaria will ink a 4-billion-euro (5.9-billion-dollar) contract covering the construction of a new nuclear plant at Belene on the Danube. Furthermore, Russia, Bulgaria and Greece are set to sign a tripartite agreement to set up a joint company to build the Burgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline which will channel Russian oil from the Caspian Sea to the Aegean.
Ecologists believe the pipeline would cause an environmental catastrophe in the Black Sea and ruin tourism in the region around the port city of Burgas.