Today, the presidents of Serbia, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan /Alexander Vucic, Rumen Radev and Ilhan Aliyev/ officially opened the gas connection between Bulgaria and Serbia in the city of Nis.
The interconnector has a capacity of 1 billion and 800 million cubic meters of blue fuel per year. Through it, Bulgaria gets access to sources of natural gas in Central Europe via a new route. The pipeline allows supplies to Serbia from the liquefied blue fuel terminals in Greece and Turkey and access to the Southern Gas Corridor. The gas pipeline will be able to transport gas in both directions - from Bulgaria to Serbia and vice versa.
The Bulgarian-Serbian gas connection is 170 kilometers long. 62 kilometers of them are on Bulgarian territory. The interconnector starts from Novi Iskar near Sofia and continues to Nis in Serbia. The gas connection is one of the main projects to improve energy connectivity in South-Eastern Europe and to diversify natural gas supplies. In February of this year, the construction of the gas connection on Bulgarian territory was started, and its construction was defined as an important step for the development of the region.
Together with the presidents of the three countries, the ambassador of the European Union to Serbia, Emmanuel Gioffre, took part in the ceremony.
The visit of Bulgarian President Rumen Radev to Serbia takes place in a period of extremely strained bilateral relations with Serbia. On November 8, the Serbian regime again demonstrated and used terror against the Bulgarians from the Western suburbs, as on the "Day of the Western suburbs" Serbian state security officers first broke into the office of the "Bosilegrad Cultural and Information Center" (CIC), and then seized books from Edwin Sugarev, who is a former consul in the city of Nis. At the same time, the border police did not allow Edwin Sugarev himself to enter the territory of Serbia and attend the presentation of his book in the club of the CIC "Bosilegrad" this evening. After a thorough search of all the premises of the Center, 23 copies of Edwin Sugarev's book were seized.
Later, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry summoned the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Serbia in Sofia, Zelko Jovic, from the General Director of European Affairs, Yordan Parvanov, and the Bulgarian side expressed a strong protest and strong concern regarding the hostile actions of the Serbian authorities towards the Bulgarian intellectual. , widely known also in the Republic of Serbia as the former Consul General in Niš, who was not allowed on Serbian territory. Later, the officers of the Serbian DS "raised a charge of ethnic, racial and religious hatred" against the director of KIC-Bosilegrad, Ivan Nikolov.
In a recent report, the European Commission called on Serbia to take urgent action to counter the anti-European narratives spread by numerous media and to counter foreign information manipulation and interference, especially in the context of Russia's aggressive war against Ukraine./BGNES
