As a member of the European Union, which is meant to have shared values on issues such as human rights, Bulgaria is fully entitled, if not obliged, to speak truth to power.

Yet, at a time when it fairly may be said that no EU country is without its concerns about the state of human rights in Russia, especially so in the case of the United Kingdom, the question was firmly off the agenda during the visit to Bulgaria by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

It was not that some ordinary Bulgarians in civic and political organisations did not wish that it were there. Tight security in exercising the obligation to protect a visiting head of state is fully understandable, yet the steel ring of law enforcement that sought to fence off legitimate protest by citizens seemed to verge on infringing their rights under the Bulgarian constitution.

Questioned by journalists about the matter, President Georgi Purvanov’s chief of staff Nikola Kolev said that human rights in Russia were a domestic matter for that country in which Bulgaria had no right to interfere. Technically true, but it seems somewhat out of balance that the official welcome given to Putin was unstintingly warm, with no opportunity taken to express the concerns felt in the multilateral bloc of which Bulgaria is a member. The same multilateral bloc that dispatched this country’s prime minister to Georgia last year to assist in that country’s progress towards lasting democracy, a progress which is well known to be under threat in part because of Russian attempts at interference.

At the end of Putin’s visit, it was clear that the Russians got everything they came to Bulgaria for. It seemed that the real principle that was in force was that Russia is able to speak power to truth.