Published on: 20.03.2026 | Author: Dr. Dimitar Keranov, MRSSAf
The Double Embrace: Russian and Chinese Influence in Bulgaria
Bulgaria is a NATO member and an EU member state, yet it remains one of the more institutionally vulnerable countries in the Euro-Atlantic space to Russian and Chinese influence. This is a consequence of structural weaknesses that neither NATO accession in 2004 nor EU membership in 2007 fully resolved. Russian influence in Bulgaria is deep, historical, and multidimensional—rooted in cultural affinity, energy dependence, intelligence legacies, and political patronage. Chinese influence is newer, more transactional, and less emotionally embedded, but it exploits many of the same institutional weaknesses. Together, they represent a dual challenge to Bulgarian sovereignty and democratic integrity that Bulgaria's Euro-Atlantic partners have been slow to recognize and slower still to address.
Russia's Influence Infrastructure
Russian influence in Bulgaria operates through channels that differ somewhat from those Moscow uses elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe; in Bulgaria, they are unusually intertwined with the national historical narrative. Russia's role in the Liberation of 1878 gives Moscow a reservoir of historical symbolism that is difficult to replicate elsewhere in the EU. That sentiment continues to be reinforced through commemorative politics, Orthodox Church linkages, cultural organizations, and pro-Russian networks that frame the relationship in terms of Slavic brotherhood and shared faith.
Energy has long been Russia's most potent lever. Before 2022, Bulgaria was almost completely dependent on Russian gas. The Greece-Bulgaria interconnector, launched in 2022, materially improved access to non-Russian gas, but it did not erase the legacy of Russian leverage over the sector. The Belene nuclear power plant project, repeatedly cancelled and revived over the years, likewise became a recurring point of strategic vulnerability in Bulgarian energy policy.
The political dimension is equally entrenched. The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), heir to the communist-era Bulgarian Communist Party, has historically maintained close ties with Moscow, even if these have become more complicated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More directly, the party Vazrazhdane (Revival), led by Kostadin Kostadinov, has emerged as the most openly pro-Russian political force in the country. Revival's formal cooperation agreement with Putin's United Russia party, signed in April 2025, its alignment with Kremlin talking points on Ukraine, its opposition to NATO deployments on Bulgarian territory, and its anti-EU and anti-NATO positioning make it a textbook case of a political formation that serves, whether by design or by convergence of interests, as a vehicle for Russian strategic messaging inside a NATO member state. The 2021 U.S. Magnitsky sanctions against Delyan Peevski further illustrated how corruption networks can function as transmission belts for foreign influence: compromised institutions and captured officials are inherently vulnerable to external manipulation, and Russia has been especially adept at exploiting this vulnerability. A further complication is the emergence of Progressive Bulgaria, the new alliance led by former president Rumen Radev, which opinion polls have placed in first position ahead of the April 19 election; Radev's repeated positions on Russia have fueled sustained criticism of a pro-Kremlin orientation.
China's Quiet Penetration
Chinese influence in Bulgaria is less emotionally charged and less publicly visible than Russian influence, but it follows a pattern familiar from Beijing's engagement across Central and Eastern Europe through the framework now known as Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries. That format began as 16+1, became 17+1 after Greece joined in 2019, and later effectively shrank to 14+1 after Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia withdrew in 2021–2022. Bulgaria has remained part of the framework, attracted by promises of investment and trade, even though China's economic presence in Bulgaria has remained relatively limited and a number of projected opportunities have not materialized at the scale once suggested.
Where Chinese influence has been more consequential is in quieter domains such as elite cultivation, academic engagement, and technology procurement. Bulgaria hosts Confucius Institutes at Sofia University and Veliko Tarnovo University, which provide Chinese language instruction and cultural programming while also serving as instruments of soft-power projection. More significant, however, are concerns related to Chinese technology firms in telecommunications and related digital infrastructure. Bulgaria signed a 5G security declaration with the United States in 2020, underscoring that such concerns are not abstract. In a state with weaker oversight and procurement safeguards, decisions in these sectors can be driven more by cost and access than by long-term security considerations.
Beijing's approach to Bulgaria benefits from many of the same captured-state dynamics that have long advantaged Russia, though through different mechanisms. Where Moscow works through historical sentiment, political affinity, and intelligence legacies, Beijing works through elite relationship-building, economic promises, and access to strategically relevant sectors. The overlap is not coordination—Russia and China pursue distinct objectives in Bulgaria—but the effect is cumulative. A state whose institutions are already weakened by domestic corruption and long-standing Russian penetration is poorly equipped to resist a second vector of authoritarian influence, even one that operates primarily through ostensibly commercial channels.
Institutional Resilience as the Only Defense
The fundamental lesson of Bulgaria's exposure to Russian and Chinese influence is that geopolitical alignment alone does not confer resilience. NATO membership and EU accession provided Bulgaria with a security umbrella and a normative framework, but they did not immunize it against authoritarian influence operations, because the vectors of that influence run through domestic institutional weaknesses that neither Brussels nor Washington can repair from the outside. Captured courts, compromised media, opaque procurement systems, and political parties that function as patronage vehicles rather than programmatic organizations are not merely governance problems; they are national security vulnerabilities.
For Bulgaria's Euro-Atlantic partners, the implication is that supporting democratic reform in Sofia is not a matter of values alone but of strategic necessity. Every unreformed institution is a potential point of entry for hostile influence. For Bulgaria itself, the implication is starker still: until the country builds the institutional resilience that decommunization should have provided and that EU accession was supposed to incentivize, it will remain a weak link in the Euro-Atlantic chain—formally allied with the West, but structurally vulnerable to the East. The double embrace of Moscow and Beijing will persist for as long as the domestic conditions that enable it remain in place.