Bulgarian officials say U.S. refuelling aircraft stationed at the Bezmer air base have left the site and ended their mission four months before the scheduled deadline.<\/p>\n
Elena Yotova, Bulgaria\u2019s vice president, told reporters at an event yesterday that the aircraft had departed and their mission was over. Bulgaria\u2019s defence minister, Dimitar Stoyanov, also said the aircraft left the base on Friday.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Bulgaria\u2019s parliament had approved the deployment of up to eight U.S. KC-135 refuelling aircraft at the Bezmer air base from July 24 to October 1, 2026. The purpose of the mission was said to be supporting U.S. operations in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
However, Bulgaria\u2019s defence ministry said only two of the aircraft arrived at the base on July 31. According to the Bulgarian defence minister, these two aircraft carried out no flights south during their stay, and all of their flights were limited to training exercises in the airspace of allied countries in the west and northwest.<\/p>\n
The Bezmer air base is located about 300 kilometres east of Sofia. It is one of Bulgaria\u2019s military facilities where the United States is allowed to station personnel and equipment under a bilateral defence agreement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
U.S. KC-135 refuelling aircraft leave Bulgaria’s Bezmer air base four months early, Bulgarian officials say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}