President Radev: True Power of Diplomacy Comes Before Bombs

Addressing a conference, titled "Wars and Peace: Will Time of Diplomacy Come?", President Rumen Radev said that the true power of diplomacy is when it comes before the bombs, and not after the devastation and casualties they cause.

The event is taking place at the Sofia Balkan Palace Hotel on Monday. It is organized by the Institute of Economics and International Relations and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

"If we look back to the past, we’ll see that humanity has lived a negligible period in universal peace, while wars have been a constant companion throughout its history. Therefore, it is a particularly worrying question why, after more than seven decades of sustainable peace in Europe and the absence of a global military clash, war is raging again," Radev said. Even during the Cold War, processes of upgrading the global security system were underway.

According to him, the world is being reshaped at an unstoppable pace. The shift of political and economic centres to the East, the new global ambitions of a number of states, the weakening of the UN's role in conflict prevention and resolution, the rise of dictatorial regimes, a number of regional groupings, which openly reject the unipolar model and take a stand for a new multipolar world - all this is part of a complex and difficult transition in which we are witnessing how the power of right is increasingly giving way to the right of might, and how the politics of peace is disappearing from the scene, and how war is returning as a means of conflict resolution, in Europe as well, the President said.

In his words, Russia's aggression against Ukraine unleashed the collapse of the global security system that had been built over the course of decades. "Our big goal is the restoration of peace both in Europe and in the Middle East, but achieving these goals requires an objective and impartial view of the war in Ukraine in the first place and a deep and objective analysis of the factors driving the armed conflict," the head of State said.

The President said that he told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he visited Bulgaria that the armed conflict in Ukraine has no military solution and the only way is to sit at the negotiating table and think of a rational formula for peace.

"We have before us a very complex diplomatic dilemma. If this war is not ended with a ceasefire to start negotiations, the casualties and destruction will grow, and at an even greater rate. However, if Ukraine and the civilized world accept the territories taken by force, it means that we accept that it is possible in our time to resolve such issues by force. This is a great dilemma, it is the cornerstone of all diplomatic efforts. We need to find such a bargaining chip that would guarantee the security of both sides," Radev said.

"We have to accept that the time has indeed come to seek peace through diplomatic and political means, but in any case this does not mean retreat before the aggressor," the President added.

"The biggest test, and the fundamental question for all others to be solved, is to answer how valuable human life is to us. Hundreds of people will die in Ukraine today. We must apply the same approach to the war between the terrorist group Hamas and Israel. The overwhelming majority of countries have already supported the right of the State of Israel to defend itself, but this right must be exercised in strict compliance with international law and must not lead to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis," Radev added.

According to the President, politics and diplomacy will increasingly find a place in the dynamics of contemporary geopolitical processes and raging conflicts.

“We are in a very worrying times with regard to nuclear weapons, their control and spread. The world has moved from a disarmament phase to an armament phase. The race that has been unleashed will have a profound economic and social effect that will give rise to political tensions and upheavals in a number of countries,” the head of State added.

Europe has started to fall behind US and China, and the energy war has contributed to this, Radev argued. “There is no way for us to talk about the competitiveness of the European economy in the long term while the price of gas and electricity in the US and China is several times lower. If Europe does not put its interest first, this gap in economic and scientific and technical development will grow,” the President said.

The nuclear card is played depending on conventional war-making capacity, Radev added. “When Russia tended to have a weak conventional [military] capacity, it compensated with nuclear rhetoric. When it already gained conventional [military] power, the nuclear rhetoric weakened,” he pointed out.

/DD/