site.btaThree Bessarabian Bulgarians from Odesa Region Killed on Front Since Early August

Three Bessarabian Bulgarians from the Bolhrad, Izmail, and Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi districts of Ukraine’s Odesa Region have been killed in action since the beginning of August.

Senior Police Lieutenant Serhiy Mahla, a resident of the village of Bessarabske in Bolhrad District, was killed on August 11. Originally from the Bulgarian village of Yarove, he died at the age of 35. News of his death was published on the municipality’s website.

On August 8, Bessarabian Bulgarian Vitali Terzi, senior technician of the 10th Rifle Company of the 4th Territorial Defence Battalion, was killed in combat. The 49-year-old resident of the village of Katlabuh in Izmail District had been conscripted into military service on February 25, 2023. He died in a drone attack.

Also on August 8, Maksym Petkov, another soldier of Bulgarian descent from the Sarata Municipality in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi District, was killed near Novodanylivka in Zaporizhzhia Region. He had joined the Ukrainian army early in the war against Russia, on March 3, 2022.

Odesa Region is home to the third largest community of expatriate Bulgarians, numbering more than 150,000 people, according to an official population census in Ukraine in 2001. There are between 50,000 and 60,000 Bulgarians in the city of Odesa. Bulgarians in the region are concentrated in the districts of Bolhrad, Izmail and Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi.