Bulgarian PM's 'Russian Meddling' Claims Sign of Government in Death Throes, Zakharova Tells Sputnik

This week, outgoing Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, whose government lost a no confidence vote last month over what the opposition characterized as the “failure of its financial and economic politics,” accused Moscow of interfering in his country’s affairs, telling The Times that Russia had “infiltrated” Bulgarian politics using corruption.

Moscow “sympathizes” with the soon-to-be ex-Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov’s evidence-free allegations about Russian “meddling” in Bulgaria’s affairs, and considers the claims a sure sign of a politician singing his swan song, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Petkov, whose six-month old coalition government collapsed in late June, claimed that his ouster was the result of Russian interference.

“We have curbed corruption locally, but we have discovered that we have a bigger enemy: Russian infiltration. We failed to understand that corruption and Russian influence are the same thing. Corruption is Moscow’s best foreign policy tool in the Balkans,” Petkov, who is now tasked with running a caretaker government until snap elections in the fall, said.

“We sincerely sympathize with [Mr. Petkov’s] concerns about the ‘long arm’ of the Kremlin," Zakharova told Sputnik.

"When it comes to logic and truth, we see no reason to comment separately on each and every deliberately false statement about Russian interference in Bulgaria’s affairs, about corruption as our ‘main foreign policy tool’ in the Balkans, or the ‘indoctrination’ of local politicians through the organization of ‘field trips’ to Greece,” the spokeswoman added.

Zakharova stressed that Russia has never interfered in the internal affairs of other countries, “just as it will never allow any country to try to impose its opinion on us.”

“Speculation around the ‘Russian threat’ for domestic political or other selfish purposes is a sure sign of political death-throes,” she said.

Zakharova expressed confidence that the spuriousness of Petkov’s claims is “just as obvious to the Bulgarian people, to whom we sincerely wish prosperity and a pragmatic government capable of acting on the basis of national interests, and not a desire to curry favor with transatlantic ‘partners.’”

Petkov, 42, resigned as prime minister on June 27 after losing a no-confidence vote after just six months in office. During the escalation of the security crisis in Ukraine this spring, Bulgaria joined EU sanctions against Russia, and refused to pay for Russian gas in rubles, prompting Gazprom to cut off deliveries and leading his ITN Party coalition partners to withdraw from his "We Continue the Change" electoral alliance-led government.

The Petkov-led coalition is one of four European governments to be swept away by the inflation and energy crisis facing Western countries amid escalating tensions with Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine. Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban compared the West’s strategy of sanctions against Moscow to “a car with flat tires on all four wheels,” and said that the restrictions, instead of destabilizing Russia, only put Europe into a severe political and economic crisis.