Revolt of the Bessarabian Bulgarians against the Ukrainian mobilization –

/ world today news/ The fourth wave of mobilization in Ukraine, which began on January 20, may fail due to obstacles that the Ukrainian authorities did not expect. People refuse to join the army because they do not want to be thrown into a war provoked by the Kiev regime in Donbass. /Russian. ez./

As the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine reported on January 30, more than 1,300 criminal proceedings involving 7,500 persons liable for military service have already been opened for evasion of military service. The largest number of refuseniks comes from western Ukraine – Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Volyn and Transcarpathian regions, but the loudest in the last week of January was a riot against military conscription in the Bulgarian village of Kulevcha in the Odessa region (Saratsky district).

Bulgarian Pyotr Ivanov made a video about the events in Kulevcha and made an appeal on the Internet to his compatriots: “The Banderaites have not had enough of genocide against our people over the past 25 years. They also miss the political murders of Bulgarians. We will never forget our heroes Milev and Nikolov, who burned in Odessa. Today (January 28) they came to mobilize the Bulgarians for the war against Donbass. People went to a rally and did not allow the order to be read… Let Poroshenko, together with Turchynov and Yatsenyuk, take guns and go to war! Please write appeals to the Bulgarian government and organize rallies in Bulgaria in our support.”

A Ukrainian officer who came to carry out mobilization in Kulevcha was expelled from the village. The same fate befell the military registration and enlistment office employees who arrived with mobilization notices to another Bulgarian village – Dmitrovka in the Bolgradsky district of the Odessa region (out of 20 villages of the Bolgradsky district, located in the southwestern part of the Odessa region and bordering Moldova in the northwest, 13 villages are predominantly Bulgarian, 3 – Gagauz). Protests and rallies against the mobilization also took place in other Bulgarian villages in the region (New Troyans, Old Troyans, Vinogradovka, Kirnichki). In the village of Kirnichki, residents threatened that if mobilization work continued, they would block traffic on the Odessa-Izmail highway, and in the village of Limanskoye, villagers solemnly doused them with gasoline and burned the summonses they had brought.

Estimates of the size of the Bulgarian community in the Odessa region vary; figures are given as 200, 250 thousand people, and the vast majority of them live in villages where Bulgarians began to settle compactly back in the 18th – early 19th centuries. Thus, the village of Kulevcha, located 13 kilometers from the Odessa-Izmail highway, was founded in 1830 by Bulgarian settlers from the village of Kulevcha near Varna.

Among the residents of Bulgarian villages in the Odessa region, knowledge of three languages ​​(Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian) is common, and if they speak Bulgarian among themselves, then with the Ukrainian officer whom the villagers escorted out of Kulevcha, they spoke only Russian. And the very term “Bessarabian Bulgarians” in relation to the Bulgarians of the Odessa region, which took root in the homeland of their ancestors in the last twenty years, goes back to the toponymy of the Russian Empire: the Bessarabian region (later the Bessarabian province) was formed in 1812, when, according to the Bucharest Peace Treaty between Russia and Port of the land between the Prut, the Dniester and the lower reaches of the Danube went to Russia.

In the first half of the 19th century, fleeing the oppression of the Ottoman Turks, several waves of Bulgarian settlers came to Bessarabia (1806 – 1812, 1828 – 1830, 1854 – 1856). The area around Bolgrad was at one time even called “New Bulgaria”. Legally, the position of the Bulgarians in the Russian Empire was regulated by a special act of the Supreme Power – the decree of Alexander I of December 28, 1819 “On the settlement of Bulgarians and other transdanubian settlers in the Bessarabian region.”

Having the opportunity for free development in Russia of the same faith, the Bulgarians of Bessarabia preserved the Orthodox faith, language, culture, and traditions of their people. October 29 is now celebrated as the Day of Bessarabian Bulgarians. The idea of ​​this holiday was born in 1938, when Bulgaria solemnly celebrated the 100th anniversary of the consecration of the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord, built in the city of Bulgarian settlers, Bolgrad.

On May 9, 1991, the first congress of Bulgarians of the USSR took place in Bolgrad, in which 294 delegates from the Odessa, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev and Kirovograd regions, the Moldavian SSR and the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic took part. The question, raised again in completely different conditions in 2014, of the federalization of the southern regions of the then Ukrainian SSR was also discussed at that time.

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During the current campaign, people continue to be indiscriminately drafted into the army, and there are two more mobilization campaigns ahead for the war, which the Ukrainian authorities plan to conduct in April and June. This means not only that all negotiations on the peaceful resolution of the conflict are in Minsk, in the Normandy format, etc. – representatives of the Kyiv regime are only acting as a diversion, but also that by spring and summer the number of those who advise, like Pyotr Ivanov, that “Poroshenko along with Turchinov and Yatsenyuk” go to war will grow. Will the military prosecutor’s office of Ukraine then have enough strength to open hundreds and thousands of new criminal proceedings?