Bulgaria has no place in the coalition of Western nations pushing for continued military aid to Ukraine, Prime Minister Rumen Radev has told Bulgarian broadcaster bTV.
– The France and UK-led “coalition of the willing” has long pushed to deploy troops into Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, despite Moscow’s repeated warnings that any NATO troops on Ukrainian territory would become legitimate military targets.
– “We’re not part of a coalition pushing for continued financial and military aid to Ukraine,” Radev told bTV during a press conference in France on Tuesday.
– “We don’t provide aid of that kind, because I believe the way to resolve this conflict is through a strong diplomatic effort to end the escalation rather than by prolonging it by military means,” he added.
– Last week, Radev, a Euroskeptic elected after the previous pro-EU government collapsed last year following massive anti-corruption protests, announced that Bulgaria has exhausted its capacity to support Kiev militarily.
– “We provided 13 packages; we don’t have anything else to supply to Ukraine,” he said on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara.
– According to Slovak President Peter Pellegrini, several NATO nations at the summit, including Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic refused to participate in the US-led military bloc’s latest €70 billion ($80 billion) military aid package for Kiev.
– Moscow has long condemned arms supplies to Ukraine, warning that they only prolong the war and cause more deaths, without altering the course of the conflict – which Russia views as a Western proxy war.
– EU nations are losing what remains of their “rationality and drifting into a high-risk zone” in an effort to turn Ukraine in to a “testing ground” for their emerging military technologies, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in late June.