Bulgaria's New Ambassador to Russia Presents Credentials to Putin

Boyko Kotsev, Bulgaria's long-time Permanent Representative in the EU, is the new Bulgarian Ambassador in Moscow. Photo by BGNES

Boyko Kotsev, Bulgaria's new Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Russian Federation has presented his credentials to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin welcomed a number of new ambassadors in Moscow at a ceremony at the Kremlin on Wednesday.

Kotsev is a career diplomat with 32 years of experience at the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry. He speaks English, French, and Russian.

He was born in Sofia in 1956, and is a graduate of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, with a degree in international law.

He has been part of the Bulgarian diplomatic mission in Zimbabwe, and has headed a number of Bulgarian diplomatic ad hoc delegations.

For the past 15 years he has been involved with Bulgaria's relations with the European Union.

In 2001-2007, Kotsev was one of Bulgaria's Deputy Ministers of Foreign Affairs.

In 2007-2012, he was Bulgaria's Permanent Representative at the EU in Brussels.

In a 2007 US diplomatic cable of former US Ambassador in Sofia John Beyrle leaked by WikiLeaks in October 2011, Kotsev was described as "pusher" who is "good with promises but not with results".

In the cable, Beyrle mentioned that according to opposition MP Atanas Atanassov, the former chief of Bulgaria's counter-intelligence service, Boyko Kotzev served as an informal legal advisor to the late Stoil Slavov.  Slavov, who was killed in a bomb explosion in 2004, was co-founder of one of the major organized crime groups in Bulgaria, SIC. Beyrle wrote that tndependent sources have not confirmed this allegation, nor has it come out in the media.

Boyko Kotsev himself has refuted the allegation that he was ever connected to Stoil Slavov or SIC.

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