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Those diplomats were ordered within 72 hours. leave Bulgaria, a former Soviet ally of Moscow. Bulgarian prosecutors believe that the diplomats in question have been seeking classified information about the military since 2016.
According to prosecutors, these diplomats, with the help of Bulgarian citizens who had access to information about the country’s military-industrial complex, collected data on the modernization plans of the Bulgarian army and the maintenance of military equipment.
Investigators are investigating whether the state secrets could have been illegally transmitted to Russian military intelligence agencies.
Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor, Ivan Geshev, briefed the country’s foreign minister on Wednesday morning on the progress of the investigation.
Moscow will have a mirror response to the expulsion of its diplomats from Sofia, warned Konstantin Kosachov, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the upper house of the Russian parliament.
“Of course, in a mirror line, for sure,” Kozachov said of Interfax’s response to Russia’s question.
According to him, “NATO countries are campaigning en masse when they send Russian diplomats one after another, accusing them of illegal activities, and deliberately agree to equivalent actions by Russia in this regard, because the purpose is different.”
This campaign “is not designed to ensure the” cleanliness “of diplomatic missions, but to maintain Russia’s public image as an enemy and a threat,” the senator said.
The Russian Embassy in Sofia also commented on a possible mirror response.
The current espionage scandal is not the first in Moscow-Sofia relations.
In January, Bulgaria accused two Russian diplomats of collecting classified information, although Russia said the charges against them were unfounded.
In October last year, Bulgaria sent the first secretary of the Russian embassy to find out that he had “carried out intelligence activities, holding regular conspiracy meetings” with Bulgarian officials authorized to work with classified information about his country, the European Union and NATO.
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