Bulgaria Parliament Votes Against Military Deployment in Ukraine

Sofia: Bulgaria’s parliament adopted a draft declaration on Friday, banning deployment of military forces in Ukraine – a move dubbed “meaningless” and “populist” by some local media.

The vote lacks authority but reflects concerns voiced by pro-Russian voices in the country. In the vote, 166 MPs supported the proposal while 27 voted against and 11 abstained.

Boyko Borissov, leader of the ruling GERB party, on Friday said that “the US remains a strategic partner and the European Union, our family”.

Referencing recent moves by US President Donald Trump to end the war in Ukraine, he said: “I support Donald Trump’s initiative to stop this extermination of peaceful citizens.

“We hope that as Bulgarians we’ll look after our own national interest,” Borissov added.

The pro-Russian party Revival voted against the draft – but only because it wanted the document to be worded more radically.

On February 18, Deputy Prime Minister Atanas Zafirov said the Council of Ministers had not discussed Bulgaria participating in peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.

The current ruling coalition, assembled after a prolonged political stalemate and a round of elections between 2021-2024, features parties that greatly differ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The mandate-holder, GERB, has been supportive of Ukraine; however, its leader, Borissov, facilitated construction of the TurkStream gas pipeline across Bulgaria in 2018-2020, when he was Prime Minister.

There’s Such a People strongly supports the deployment ban and has played close to Bulgaria’s Moscow-friendly President, Rumen Radev. Soldiers would be sent to Ukraine “over my dead body”, MP Stanislav Balabanov told the media on Thursday: “Not a single Bulgarian citizen should be sent to the front in Ukraine.”

The coalition’s third partner, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, is traditionally aligned with the Kremlin.

In parliament, the ruling coalition is supported by the Alliance for Rights and Freedoms, one of the two parties to emerge from the dissolution of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms in 2024. It is led by Ahmed Dogan, once blacklisted by Turkey as a Russian asset.

President Radev has criticised any possible idea of deployment, seeing it as fulfillment of his previous warnings from the start of the war that Bulgaria risks becoming more deeply involved.

Other parties, such as “We Continue the Change” and Democratic Bulgaria, which were in power at the onset of the invasion and have a clear pro-Ukraine profile, have remained silent.