The paper is a contrastive study of the Russian construction bez togo, čtoby (ne) ‘~ without -ing’ and its Bulgarian counterpart bez da. It is shown that the use of the Russian construction has expanded onto non-veridical contexts, thus matching the current status of the Bulgarian construction. The Russian construction often contains the negation ne in the subordinate clause whose semantic contribution is evasive. We explore whether its classification as expletive is warranted.