President Plevneliev in Munich: "We Are in a Period of Cold Peace"


Sofia, January 8 (BTA) - Addressing the 51st Munich Security
Conference on February 7, Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev
said that the security environment in Europe changed
dramatically in 2014, the President's Press Secretariat
reported. "We are in a new phase of development which I would
describe as Cold Peace," said Plevneliev, who took part in a
presidential debate along with his counterparts from Ukraine,
Lithuania and Finland.

"It is peace, because no one wants war and no one wants to go
back to the period of the Cold War. This peace is,
unfortunately, cold, because it uses methods which were typical
of the Cold War and even of periods before that, when politics
was split between world powers and marginal nations, a pattern
which we hoped had remained in the past, and it involved the use
 of force to redraw borders and an unprecedented propaganda
war," Plevneliev said.

He singled out three main challenges to the post-Cold War
security model in Europe arising from the Ukraine crisis.
Discussing the first challenge, he said that the period of the
Ukraine crisis since the beginning of 2014 has involved a
transition from Cold War to Cold Peace. "In this new phase of
Cold Peace, frozen conflicts are a given - in Georgia,
Transdniestria, Nagorno-Karabakh. I believe that Europe is faced
 with a real threat and there is ample evidence that a hybrid
war is being waged and that a strategy to create frozen
conflicts is being implemented," he said.

The second major challenge to Europe's security, Plevneliev
said, has to do with the inability of Russia's government,
society and economy to adjust to the processes of globalization
and integration. "The future will not come through gas pipelines
 - it will come through efficiency, sustainable development and
innovation, not by using energy as a weapon. The solution today,
 despite Russia's resistance, is to keep up the process of
integration, keep working on free trade agreements, on
liberalizing the electricity and gas markets and setting up
energy exchanges where energy is traded freely at market
prices," the Bulgarian President said.

The third main challenge is Russia's resistance to the European
model and European values, he said.

"Twenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall fell and Europe began to
 make history. Democracy spread eastward. Europe emerged as the
world's largest economy and a global leader. But Europe needs to
 wake up, because over the last few years we have lost our
direction and we have sunk deeper into our own problems. We are
making bureaucratic rules, not history," Plevneliev said.