According to the latest figures of Eurostat released on Monday, Bulgaria granted citizenship to 900 foreign nationals in 2014.

In 99 % of the cases, those granted Bulgarian citizenship came from non-EU countries.

This is the second highest rate of granting citizenship to non-EU citizens after Estonia where all people granted Estonian citizenship were from countries outside the EU.

At the EU level, 89 % of those granted EU citizenship came from countries outside the EU.

Bulgaria granted the largest number of citizenships to Ukrainians (22.4 %), followed by Russians (16.2 %) and Moldovans (14 %).

In 2014, the 28 member states of the EU granted citizenship to a total of 889 139 foreigners, which represented a decrease of around 91 000 people compared to 2013.

Since 2009, a total of five million people have been granted citizenship of an EU member state.

In 2014, the main recipients of EU citizenship were from Morocco (10.4 %), followed by Albanians (4.6 %) and Turkish (4.2 %).

Spain granted the largest number of citizenships – 205 900, followed by Italy, the UK, Germany and France.

Luxembourg had the highest number of citizenships granted per 1000 resident population, followed by Ireland, Sweden and Spain.

In this respect, Bulgaria was far below the EU average of 1.8 citizenships per 1000 resident population with just 0.1.

Bulgaria was also below the EU’s average naturalization rate of 2.6 citizenships per 100 resident foreigners.

The naturalization rate was highest in Sweden, Hungary and Portugal, while Austria, Latvia and Slovakia had the lowest ones.