Bulgaria questions Soviet Union’s role in liberating Eastern Europe from Nazi
The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry has advised the Russian embassy to stop distributing the “questionable assertion” that the Soviet Union liberated Eastern Europe by defeating Nazi Germany.
“Without denying the USSR’s contribution to the defeat of Nazism in Europe, we must not close our eyes to the fact that the Soviet Army brought half a century of repression to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe,” the department remarked.
The Foreign Ministry released the statement the day before the Russian Cultural Center in Sofia opened an exhibition titled “75 years since the liberation of Eastern Europe from Nazism”. The department said that the exhibition constituted interference in the internal political debate.
In response, the Russian diplomatic mission in Bulgaria said that it was “discouraged” by the Foreign Ministry’s statement, because only archive materials would be displayed at the exhibition. The embassy asserted that the exhibition “has nothing to do with the current Bulgarian political discourse”.
Soviet troops entered Bulgaria in September 1944 and fought simultaneously against both the Bulgarian and the German armies. The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry now considers the Soviet Union guilty of temporarily occupying the country.