24 March 2025
Mr. President,
We would like to thank UN Secretary General António Guterres and Ms. Jena Russo for the assessments they voiced. We welcome high-level representatives at our meeting today.
Today, we are discussing a very voluminous section of the UN’s activities in maintaining peace and security – specifically, peace operations. This notion includes within itself peacekeeping operations (PKOs) and special political missions (SPMs). These are UN instruments with politics lying at the heart of them. However, these two categories of UN presence differ significantly in terms of their mandates, their goals, the means they employ, as well as in terms of how they are funded. The international community is to select the proper means of response and assistance depending on what objectives host countries have. We believe this is the factor we must bear in mind while discussing the topic before us today.
Mr. President,
In various UN inter-governmental formats, we have repeatedly reiterated the need for the UN Security Council to develop clear and realistic mandates for the PKOs and SPMs. It is indeed not easy to achieve unity in the Council on missions’ mandates. In addition to the obvious tasks, mandates embrace the priorities of various participants in the negotiation process. Some things may serve the interest of the Secretariat itself. As a result, what we have been doing in practice for many years was not specifying the mandates but, on the contrary, broadening the range of tasks assigned to missions. In addition to their traditional political functions, special political missions, in some cases, have to assist countries in such areas as law enforcement, drafting basic laws, and holding elections. There have also been attempts to substantiate the idea that SPMs can contribute to the protection of civilians, which – in our opinion – is not the case. Peacekeepers, on the contrary, have been assigned secondary tasks related to human rights, gender and climate issues.
As a result, we ended up in a situation whereby missions have been present in countries for decades, incurring billions of dollars in expense for the international community. However, not all of them can boast of success: conflicts are spiraling out, people lose hope for positive change. Moreover, the involvement of international players in domestic political processes may give rise to legitimate concerns among host governments about the risks of interference in their internal affairs. The flip side of the coin is the fear that those governments may lose their power as soon as such ‘support’ missions leave the country. This gap between the actual results and the cost of missions is becoming an increasingly stronger irritant.
All this attests to the fact that the UN’s peacekeeping and political activities need to be reconsidered, improved and brought back to realistic scenarios. However, what we’ve mainly observed so far is attempts at self-justification – it is being said that host countries are misbehaving, that the contingents are not properly trained, that the geopolitical context is hindering all the efforts, or that it is misinformation that we should blame for everything. On top of that, we run the risk that in the near future the situation will be further exacerbated by the financial crisis at the United Nations.
For our part, we are convinced that progress here is possible not until we honestly analyze why host States are questioning the need to host missions, and opting for other (more effective) forms of assistance. Only based on such assessment can we find political, rather than technical, solutions to the problems that arise.
In this regard, the merely formalistic search for so-called “innovative” solutions and new approaches (often purely artificial) is something that seems to us inexpedient. Thus, we do not support the proposal to develop certain modules that either repeat some components of existing mandates or duplicate the tasks of other UN bodies. It makes no sense to theorize about the forms of future conflicts having to do with natural disasters, cyber and maritime security while we are still facing today quite traditional inter-State and internal crises – and tomorrow may well bring us some completely unpredictable challenges. At the same time, political problems remain unaddressed. Thus, we see alien ideologies being imposed on host countries under the guise of promoting some kind of universal values; and strengthening OPM’s intelligence capabilities is hindered due to the absence of confidence that the confidentiality will be honored and the information will be used impartially, which is compounded by the fact that information can be obtained from unreliable sources.
Mr. President,
We believe that the Organization, for nearly 80 years of its existence, has accumulated sufficient expertise and tools to assist States in preventing conflicts, reaching peace deals, creating conditions for implementing these deals or in peacebuilding. And each situation should be addressed using a tailor-made solution worked out precisely for it. In this regard, much can and should be gleaned from the past. And yet, we are convinced that advancing the continuity in providing peacekeeping assistance may result in creating a category of countries that would be permanent recipients of UN assistance. Such countries will not only become dependent on the UN but they will also be limited in their sovereignty. There is no need to automatically transform one form of UN presence into another, such as transforming PKOs into SPMs and the like. It is important to bear in mind that the best option here is to make sure that as soon as the mandate is fully fulfilled, all responsibility for conflict prevention and conflict management is transferred to States themselves. And this is the goal we need to be focused on.
Mr. President,
We believe that any discussions on the future of peacekeeping and any initiatives on reforming this institution should be worked out and discussed not at individual conferences in European countries, but within the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, which is a unique platform that involves all stakeholders, including troop-contributing countries.
Given the work being done by the Secretary-General to prepare a review of the future of all UN peace operations, we would like to underscore that it is imperative to have thorough consultations with Member States and take their views into account. We also believe that it is necessary to assess which tasks assigned to PKOs and SPMs really help to achieve sustainable peace and which ones are not meaningful or even delay attaining the fragile balance on the path towards reconciliation. It is important to realistically assess what is truly within the capabilities of peace operations and what goes beyond them and requires the will on the part of the warring parties, bilateral assistance or the involvement of regional organizations, such as the African Union. We are also convinced that whatever transformations UN peacekeeping operations undergo, they must be based on unconditional respect for the sovereignty of the host States, strict observance of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, as well as on the imperative of complying with the basic principles of peacekeeping – namely, consent of the parties, impartiality and the non-use of force except in self-defense and defense of the mandate.
In conclusion, we would like to express our support for the UN peacekeeping operations and special political missions, whose troops, police and civilian personnel continue discharging their tasks to save and alleviate the lives of people, often paying the highest price for that. We are confident that peacekeeping operations and special political missions will be no less needed in the future. And it is the future that will tell us which forms will prove to be most viable.
Thank you.