Alex Alexiev, expert in international security and chair of the Centre for Balkan and Black Sea Research, spoke for Radio FOCUS on Wednesday, commenting on urgent issues.

“Airstrikes will not lead to success against the Islamic State (IS); a land operation is needed,” he said.

“In this respect, I am critical of the US policy as there would be no solution to the fight against terrorism in Syria, [against] the Islamic State (IS) if there are no ground troops. The Americans refuse to do that; I am not familiar with a single case in the history of wars in which air forces won a war on their own,” Alexiev remarked.

According to him, Russia’s interference in Syria has a political aim, not a military one.

Alex Alexiev believes Russia wants, on the one hand, to save Bashar al-Assad and, on the other hand, Russian President Putin wishes to divert attention away from the fact he is losing in Ukraine.

In the specialist’s view, Barack Obama is the weakest US president of the past 40 years as he is too timid.

Alexiev thinks in the meantime the USA is not launching a land operation in Syria as US people have grown weary of peace enforcement operations.

“Note that America has been fighting wars for 12 years now. First, it was with Afghanistan, then in Iraq. Considerable [financial] resources were spent on this; there were lots of victims, American victims. And there is indeed a feeling America does not desire anymore to attempt to be a “world’s policeman”,” Alex Alexiev stressed.

“Unless Bulgaria immediately starts rearming its army, it will very soon have to pay other countries for its security,” he went on to say.

“Bulgaria de facto has no fighter jets as they were manufactured in Soviet times and are not compatible with NATO requirements,” Alexiev was explicit.

In his words, a nation that does not spend enough on its defence, practically speaking, spends money on other nations’ military force.

“It is a big issue and a big failure on the part of Bulgarian politicians that de facto we do not have western arms so many years after the transition period [started]. We still rely on Warsaw Pact armaments, which are incompatible with these of our allies. It is high time the nation realised if we do not start ensuring our security, no one else will do it for us. There is no security for free. We have to simply as a nation think seriously about how to ensure our security,” Alexiev commented further.

According to him, urgent measures are needed to improve Bulgarian security and defence as Bulgaria is a “front country”.