Ukraine Today
March 16, 2015
Bulgaria and the US holding joint military drills
Over the weekend Bulgaria held military drills jointly with the US; the first in a series of exercises to be conducted over the next three and a half months according to the Bulgarian defence ministry.
This comes following exercises earlier this week in which NATO’s Black Sea members Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey joined four other NATO states – the United States, Canada, Germany and Italy – in a multi-national naval drill in the Black Sea.
The NATO drills took place just across the water from Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.
Tensions between the US-led military alliance and Russia have escalated significantly in the past year following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its subsequent support for militants in east Ukraine. As a result of the Kremlin’s actions NATO has stepped up its presence in eastern Europe and has sought especially to reassure the Baltic states, which border Russian and are home to significant Russian-speaking minorities.
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