Bulgaria is about to become the EU`s pro-Kremlin nightmare – The Telegraph publishes an article with such a title.

"Sometimes, it seems as if the EU can never catch a break among the eastern half of its membership. No sooner had Hungarian voters finally given the bloc`s most indefatigable critic, Viktor Orbán, his marching orders after 16 years in power, than the Bulgarians elected another so-called populist with a reputation for being pro-Russian. Whilst it is often a fool`s errand to ascribe neat ideological labels to parties in Eastern Europe, most observers categorise Rumen Radev`s victorious Progressive Bulgaria Party as broadly Left-wing on economics, but with conservative and nationalistic tendencies on social and foreign policy.

Mr Radev, who was Bulgaria`s president, is now set to assume the far more powerful role of prime minister, bringing to an end an era in which Bulgarian politics was dominated by free-market liberals. But what is likely to be of greater concern to Bulgaria’s EU partners is the new prime minister`s attitude toward Russia – with much of the commentary from overseas focussing on Radev`s moderately pro-Moscow orientation.

This is true, and also slightly misleading when stated without proper qualification. Compared to other ex-communist countries that functioned as Soviet satellites during the Cold War, Bulgarian politics is nowhere near as instinctively anti-Russian.

This is partly because Bulgaria sees itself historically as the frontier of the Orthodox Christian, Slavic world, where it comes up against the Muslim Turkic world. Looking further back than the Cold War, to the 19th century and earlier, it was the Ottoman Turks who were Bulgaria`s colonial rulers.

Russia, on the other hand, became Bulgaria`s first ally after it achieved independence. During the Second World War, Bulgaria was the only Axis-aligned country to refuse to declare war on the USSR. Alas, this was not sufficient to prevent the Soviets ousting the seven-year-old Tsar Simeon II when the Red Army arrived in Sofia in 1944. Many years later, after the Russians had left, a 64-year-old Simeon went on to win the 2001 general election, serving as Bulgarian prime minister until 2005. During the communist period, Bulgaria was unusually close to Moscow, even by the standards of the Warsaw Pact. Twice, in 1963 and 1973, Bulgaria`s communist-era strongman Todor Zhivkov went as far as applying for his country to become part of the USSR. On both occasions, the requests were declined by Moscow.

In the modern era, this brotherly feeling has meant that Bulgarians are unconflicted about looking both east and west. Despite enthusiastically joining both the EU and Nato, Bulgaria has retained very close links to Russia, particularly in energy. Russian businessmen and investors play a major role in Bulgaria`s economy; the country has a similar oligarch-dominated business system as Russia, with so-called Bulgarian "minigarchs" often serving as the local clients for more powerful Russian patrons.

Favouring links to Moscow is consequently far less controversial for a Bulgarian politician than it is for a Pole or a Hungarian – and it is far easier for them to get away with it in Brussels. The EU`s major weakness among its eastern members is that it is far more sensitive to rhetoric than it is to reality. Especially if the rhetoric is Eurosceptic.

Whereas leaders like Viktor Orbán – and previously his conservative counterparts in Poland as well – gained huge amounts of negative publicity in western Europe because of his Eurosceptic or pro-Russian statements, Bulgaria`s links with Moscow are usually forgotten about.

Previous governments in Bulgaria were able to get away with lobbying for reduced or delayed sanctions on Russia and other diplomatic concessions to Moscow because they did so quietly and without the noisy anti-EU rhetoric. A decade ago, it was even alleged that the Bulgarian authorities were issuing Interpol Red Notices against Russian dissidents in the EU at the Kremlin`s request. This attracted barely a murmur of controversy among pro-EU media in the West.

Bulgaria is not the only case of Brussels being willing to look the other way when the conduct of "good Europeans" is called into question. Orbán`s governments in Hungary were called into question for alleged corruption, whilst it is considered bad manners to notice that what goes on in Romania is often far more flagrant. But the problem for Mr Radev is that, with Europhiles now firmly in power in Budapest and Warsaw, traditional Bulgarian sympathy for Russia is likely to stick out a lot more than it did in the past", - reads the article.