Парламентарни избори 2017

SOFIA, Bulgaria—In the run-up to presidential elections in Bulgaria last year, the country’s opposition Socialist Party received a secret strategy document proposing a road map to victory at the ballot box, according to five current or former Bulgarian officials.

Among its recommendations: plant fake news and promote exaggerated polling data.

The source of the roughly 30-page dossier, intercepted by Bulgaria’s security service, was a think tank connected to the Kremlin, according to the officials. It was delivered by a former Russian spy on a U.S. sanctions list, three of them said.

In November, the Socialists’ candidate, Rumen Radev, emerged victorious. Now, the party—which wants to end European Union sanctions against Russia and limit North Atlantic Treaty Organization operations around the Black Sea—is a front-runner in parliamentary elections to be held Sunday.

“I’m very worried,” said Rosen Plevneliev, a Kremlin critic who was Mr. Radev’s predecessor as president. “Russian activity across Eastern Europe has gone to a new level.”

Neither Bulgaria’s presidency, the Socialist Party nor Russia’s foreign ministry responded to repeated calls for comment on the report. There is no suggestion Mr. Radev was aware of the document, and the president has made no comment on allegations of Russian meddling here.
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Russia has long denied doing anything nefarious in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe and says it is pursuing its legitimate interests in nations where it has deep economic and cultural links. Moscow sees NATO’s eastward expansion as a threatening intrusion into an area it considers within its longstanding sphere of influence.

Leonid Reshetnikov, the former Russian spy, acknowledged meeting with the leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, but denied delivering any document. “Someone is making this up,” he said in an interview in the Moscow headquarters of the Double-Headed Eagle Society, an office decorated with portraits of President Putin and Tsar Nicholas II. “Whoever [did this] is interested in breaking things up, in cooling off the relations between Bulgaria and Russia…It’s just fiction.”

Leonid Reshetnikov, right, meets with Mikhail Fradkov, his replacement as head of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in January.Photo: ZUMAPRESS.com

Across broad swaths of central and Eastern Europe, where less than 30 years ago populations rose up against Soviet domination and turned to embrace the West, Russia is regaining influence and undermining the position of the EU and the U.S.-led trans-Atlantic alliance.

Earlier this month, representatives of Poland, Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic states appeared before a U.S. Senate panel to seek American help to blunt Russian inroads. Estonia’s ambassador to Washington warned Russians were working to “create tensions and sow confusion” in the EU.

Their plea comes as citizens from Sofia to Budapest and beyond who once had high hopes for Western prescriptions of democracy and market economics have become disillusioned by financial and political crises and a big influx of migrants into Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is exploiting that dynamic across Europe’s poorer eastern flank, deploying an arsenal of weapons old and new—including propaganda and economic leverage, hacking and political subterfuge—to bolster allies and discredit the West, according to regional officials, Western diplomats and analysts.

Authorities in the small Balkan nation of Montenegro allege that Russia orchestrated a coup attempt aimed at derailing its NATO membership. Moscow says it wasn’t involved in the attempt, which failed. In Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria, the Kremlin has backed right-wing and euroskeptic nationalist groups, European security officials say, while across the region, websites hostile to NATO and Brussels have mushroomed.

“It’s Russia’s aim to undermine the political cohesion in Western institutions,” says Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former head of NATO and prime minister of Denmark. “We haven’t yet fully grasped the consequences.”

As Moscow stands accused of deploying an array of digital tools in an effort to sway the U.S. presidential election, and Western European governments warn of Russian meddling as they hold their own polls this year, critics say the Russian model is visible in its most advanced form in countries like Bulgaria, which next year is scheduled to hold the EU’s rotating presidency for the first time.

That is prompting alarm that the Kremlin is using these states to establish beachheads inside critical Western institutions.

Shortly before Bulgaria, once one of the Soviet Union’s staunchest allies, joined the EU in 2007, Russia’s ambassador to the bloc told a Sofia newspaper: “We are hoping that you will be our special partner, a kind of Trojan horse in the EU.”

Opponents of Russia say the Kremlin has done everything it can to make that prophecy come true in a country that is also one of the newest members of NATO.

The EU’s poorest member state, Bulgaria has for centuries shared deep historical and economic ties with Russia, including the Orthodox Christian faith and Slavic culture. Many in the country’s aging population, bruised by economic mismanagement and endemic corruption, feel nostalgic for the communist past.

The high-water mark for Bulgaria’s EU embrace was 2009, when a new pro-European party won a landslide victory and initiated market liberalizations and an anticorruption drive that appeared to cement the country’s pro-Western orientation. But years of weak growth and corruption stifled that momentum, creating a vacuum Russia was well-positioned to fill.

A few dozen people, some carrying Russian flags, gather in front of the main cathedral in the Bulgarian capital Sofia on July 1, 2016, to welcome members of a Kremlin-funded Russian-nationalist motorcycle club.Photo: Jodi Hilton for The Wall Street Journal

Bulgarian security officials allege that Moscow bankrolled protests in 2012 and 2013 that helped topple a pro-Western government. Russian hackers have attacked numerous sensitive targets in the country and interfered in the 2015 municipal elections, Bulgaria’s former president said in an interview. Pro-Russian websites have proliferated.

Given Bulgaria’s extreme energy reliance on Russia, which provides over 90% of its natural gas and all the fuel for its Soviet-built nuclear power station, and the important role of Russian companies in the national economy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, concluded in a report last year that Bulgaria “is at high risk of Russian-influenced state capture.”

Last August, as Bulgaria’s politicians were gearing up for the current cycle of presidential and parliamentary elections, Kornelia Ninova, chairwoman of the Socialist Party, attended a private meeting in a boutique Sofia hotel with the former Russian spy, Mr. Reshetnikov.

The silver-haired Mr. Reshetnikov, a fluent Bulgarian speaker and Balkan specialist who once headed the analysis section of the Kremlin’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, had long cultivated connections to the Socialists and other leading Bulgarian politicians. The Socialist Party evolved from the ruling Communists after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a transition that included renouncing Marxism-Leninism.

Mr. Reshetnikov attained the rank of lieutenant general in the SVR before retiring in 2009. He then became director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a Moscow think tank that until he took over was a formal part of the SVR. The institute didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Reshetnikov played down the meeting with Ms. Ninova, saying they spoke for only 30 minutes and that he was mainly on holiday in Bulgaria. “My granddaughters were vacationing in the mountains there; I came to pick them up and take them to Moscow,” he said in the interview.

The precise relationship of Mr. Reshetnikov—a self-styled commentator who has long predicted the demise of the West—with the Kremlin is murky. Some analysts argue he is but one of a handful of political actors competing to spearhead Moscow’s regional operations.

“There’s myth-building here of course, but he’s a player,” said Mark Galeotti, a specialist on Russia’s security services at the Institute of International Relations Prague.

In November, Mr. Reshetnikov told Russian and Bulgarian media that he and Ms. Ninova had discussed a possible presidential bid by Mr. Radev weeks before he was publicly anointed as the Socialists’ candidate.

When first asked about the meeting by Bulgarian media, Ms. Ninova denied it had taken place. She later acknowledged meeting Mr. Reshetnikov, but said that they didn’t discuss Mr. Radev.

“The truth is that Mr. Radev was not Mr. Reshetnikov’s proposal,” Ms. Ninova said in an interview. Of the August meeting, she said; “It was the first and last time I met him.”

Bulgaria President-elect Rumen Radev is congratulated by well wishers during a handover ceremony in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Jan. 22, 2017.Photo: Reuters

Senior government officials say another aspect of the meeting was never made public: Mr. Reshetnikov’s purported hand delivery of the detailed election-campaign game plan from Moscow. Ms. Ninova didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment on the report.

Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security, the country’s equivalent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, obtained a copy of the document, people familiar with the matter say. In keeping with protocol for the most sensitive intelligence matters, the security services allowed only a handful of the country’s top officials to read—or receive a briefing on—the document, according to these people.

The document included recommendations to commission weekly surveys that would exaggerate the Socialists’ support, according to senior officials who read it. The document offered advice on how to burnish the candidate’s image by planting stories with Moscow-friendly news outlets. The stories were to be closely coordinated, publishing first in fringe blogs before entering mainstream media en masse to create maximum impact and ultimately become election talking points for the party.

The report recommended the party emphasize issues that dovetailed with Kremlin policy: calling for an end to Russian sanctions, criticizing NATO and talking up the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU.

It wasn’t possible for the Journal to verify to what extent any such proposals were implemented or whether they helped Mr. Radev. He won comfortably, with 59% of the vote.

A few days after Montenegrin authorities said they had foiled an allegedly Russian-backed coup attempt and plan to assassinate the prime minister in November, Mr. Reshnetikov stepped down as head of the Russian institute. In December, he was sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role as a board member at Tempbank, a Russian lender that has financed the government of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Srdjan Darmanovic, foreign minister of Montenegro, which hopes to become part of NATO this year, says Mr. Reshetnikov “has acted as a propaganda fist” in his country. Mr. Plevneliev, the former Bulgarian president, described Mr. Reshetnikov as “the right hand of Mr. Putin on the Balkans.”

One of Mr. Radev’s first stops on the campaign trail last September was a visit to the annual gathering of Bulgaria’s National Russophile Movement, an important pro-Moscow group.

“The cultural and spiritual bond between our two nations is an advantage for us,” Mr. Radev told a cheering crowd of thousands waving Russian and Bulgarian flags. “Russia must not be branded an enemy.”

In the weeks before the vote, the number of pro-Russian and anti-Western news items mushroomed, according to media monitors and political analysts. Hundreds of social-media accounts, often with variations of the same name, amplified the message, posting and retweeting these stories thousands of times.

Vassil Velichkov, a tech entrepreneur and former government adviser who runs a data analytics company called Sensika, says that a media-monitoring algorithm he developed detected a surge in anti-Western articles with phrases such as “Attack against Putin,” “Death of the European Union,” and “NATO is a tumor.”

The number of such stories in Bulgarian media rose from around 50 a day during the summer months to up to 400 a day in the two weeks before the election, Mr. Velichkov said, adding that social-media channels showed a similar trend.

“It’s the old KGB tricks adapted for the social-media age,” Mr. Velichkov said. “The EU doesn’t know how to respond.”

A Bulgarian polling company, Gallup International, which isn’t related to U.S. pollster Gallup Inc., accurately predicted Mr. Radev’s victory. The company, which is being sued by Gallup Inc. for using its name without authorization, also co-published a February poll that said citizens of four NATO members, including Bulgaria, would choose Russia, rather than NATO, to defend them if they were attacked. Those results were at odds with a similar poll by Gallup Inc., published a few days earlier, showing that most NATO members in Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria, see the alliance as protection.

Gallup International didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“This wrapped-in-secrecy poll had no details on methodology nor funding sources,” said Ilian Vassilev, Bulgaria’s former ambassador to Moscow. “Russian media strategists and their Bulgarian proxies used the Western name to fool people about its credibility and spread their message.”

In the months following his victory, Mr. Radev, a fighter pilot who studied at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., has sought to balance more pro-Russian positions with a renewed commitment to the West.

He has repeatedly argued that sanctions against Russia should be lifted, but has also reaffirmed Bulgaria’s commitment to the EU and NATO, playing down his ties to Moscow. “Labeling people is a simplistic political practice,” he told reporters in a trip to Brussels.

Still, concerns are mounting at NATO headquarters. “Everything has become a game of political football in Bulgaria,” said one NATO official. “Everyone is trying to play to pro-Russian voters.”

Reformist Bloc party candidate Nikolay Nenchev, Bulgaria's former defense minister, on the campaign trail.Photo: Jodi Hilton for The Wall Street Journal

Two weeks after Mr. Radev’s victory, outgoing Defense Minister Nikolay Nenchev was charged with violating a contract with Russia because he planned to shift maintenance work on the Bulgarian air force’s Russian-made MiG-29 fighters away from Russia to Poland, a fellow NATO member. Now, he is on trial in a closed court.

Mr. Nenchev says he has done nothing wrong and blames his prosecution on “Russian proxies” in Bulgaria.

In his first interview as president, Mr. Radev told national television last week that he expects to welcome Mr. Putin in Sofia next March. Mr. Radev said the two presidents could be patrons of Bulgaria’s national holiday marking the 140th anniversary since Russian troops helped the country’s liberation from Ottoman rule.

Campaigning in the parliamentary elections set for this Sunday, the Socialists have called on the EU to lift international sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea, arguing that they hurt the Bulgarian economy and its trade with Russia and have promised to restart construction of a major Russia-backed gas pipeline.

According to the latest opinion polls, the Socialists and center-right GERB were each poised to capture around 30% of the vote. The Socialist Party’s chances of forming a coalition to govern are considered strong, since many of the other parties in the race are also pro-Russian. A win for the Socialist Party would put it in charge of Bulgaria’s two power centers—the presidency and the parliament—for the first time in nearly a decade.

“Bulgaria and Russia are brotherly nations,” Svetlana Sharenkova, a Socialist candidate for parliament, said in a speech at a party congress last month. “Just as we respect the rules of the EU and NATO, they need to respect the reality of our special relations with Russia.”

—Nathan Hodge in Moscow and Julian E. Barnes in Brussels contributed to this article.

Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson[]wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev[]wsj.com