SHAMAROV P.V. Russian Peacekeeping Model in the Post-Soviet Space
DOI 10.35775/PSI.2019.33.3.006
P.V. SHAMAROV Candidate of Military Sciences, Associate Professor, Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences, Department Specialist, Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia
RUSSIAN PEACEKEEPING MODEL IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE
The article examines the national-state peacekeeping activities of the Russian Federation in the CIS, which is identified as a “specific force peacekeeping”, which in the interests of ensuring the national security of Russia allows the state to partially move away from a number of classical principles of peacekeeping and tasks of crisis settlement of the military contingents of the Commonwealth countries in conjunction with the warring parties.
The modern peacekeeping model of the Russian Federation in the CIS is singled out and justified, which is implemented on the basis of a pragmatic and expedient approach in order to increase Russia's strategic, political, military and other influence in the Commonwealth under conditions of sufficiently cool United similar operations and the traditional hostile reaction of the leading countries of the West to Russian peacekeeping in the CIS.
The specificity of the implementation of the named Russian model in the Commonwealth is explained by the rigid timeframes of taking urgent political decisions at the beginning of the peacekeeping operations of the Russian Federation, the scale and intensity of conflicts, their significant negative impact on the national security of the country, regional and international situation.
The author formulates the concept of “network peacekeeping with variable geometry”, the use of which in modern Russian peacekeeping practice will increase the level of its national security.
Key words: peacekeeping, peacekeeping operation, post-Soviet space, UN, CIS, NATO, conflict, crisis, national security.
Implementation by the Russian Federation of its national-state peacekeeping activities (“PA”) in the post-Soviet space is identified by the Russian scientific and expert community as “specific peacekeeping” with a number of distinctive features. The main features of such operations are: “lesser legitimacy of the force (compared with the UN)” [12. P. 243] (in the CIS, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation does not have a supranational mandate of the UN or any other authorized organization) and insufficiently “qualitative results” [10. P. 8] due to the simultaneous settlement of five different conflicts in the post-Soviet space [1. P. 70].
While accepting the indicated characteristics, we still believe that a more accurate substantive content of the Russian peacekeeping operations (“POs”) in the Commonwealth reflects the concept of “specific peacekeeping by force.” It allows the state a partial departure from a number of classic UN principles in the interests of ensuring its national security (“NS”), in particular, from the principal of “impartiality and multinational representation in the PO”, as well as joint involvement of the military contingents of the Commonwealth countries and conflicting parties in the resolution of the peacekeeping tasks [6. P. 140-153]. In particular, a similar situation was observed during the settlement of the Transnistrian and Georgian-South Ossetian conflicts (from 1992 to the present time and from 1992 to 2008, respectively). There, on the basis of previously signed interstate agreements (that is, without mandates of the UN, OSCE or CIS), our country not only deployed peacekeeping contingents of its armed forces, but also involved in peacekeeping units of the conflicting parties.
All this allows us to talk about the formation of the “Russian model of peacekeeping” within the CIS, which allows in a number of urgent cases (in case of threat to the NS of the Russian Federation) a forceful intervention in the crisis in order to quickly localize it and resolve it without proper international mandate in accordance with the views of the Russian leadership and on its military-political terms. The implementation of such model is primarily aimed not so much at a political settlement of the conflict as at the end of the phase of acute armed confrontation, restoration of relative stability and civil order in the crisis territories [2. Pp. 107-109].
This approach corresponds to the prevailing world practice, only in the current century influential peacekeeping actors (members of the UN Security Council and NATO) more than 10 times forcefully intervened in internal conflicts of other countries without a UN mandate [9. p. 106]. Moreover, the concept of “Russian model of peacekeeping” proposed by us has an integrative nature and includes in its content both the post-Soviet conflict resolution model and the PA outside the CIS [15. Pp. 9-13].
We believe that such a peacekeeping approach of Russia, although it goes beyond the classical principles of peacekeeping, nevertheless predetermined the cessation of “hot” armed confrontation in the CIS, provided conditions for a political settlement and peace-building, stabilized the internal political situation, which is recognized by the UN leadership as the main goals of its PO [5. Pp. 1-2]. We also note that a number of researchers define the modern Russian PA in the post-Soviet space as “a timely policy to prevent the mass genocide of the civilian population,” thanks to which, after the collapse of the USSR, hundreds of thousands of people were saved who otherwise could have become innocent victims of the conflicts [16. P. 49].
We believe that the specifics of the PO of the Russian Federation in the CIS are also predetermined by the absence of a peacekeeping doctrine universally recognized by the world community, as a result of which conflict resolution takes place within the framework of a unique casual approach to choose the most preferred crisis management tools, and the POs in each case turn into a field testing laboratory for developing the theory of peacekeeping.
In this regard, we share the scientific approach that the process of formation of promising elements of a new global regulation system that started in the 2000s requires intensification of Russian efforts within the framework of the initiative doctrinal contribution of our state to the reform of the international PA. The latter, in our opinion, is connected, firstly, with the development of a domestic model of tools for the effective protection of the national interests (NI) of the Russian Federation abroad; secondly, the creation of a standardized algorithm for conducting Russian POs and, thirdly, the implementation in the world of a proactive foreign policy ideology aimed at improving Russia's international and peacekeeping ratings.
For example, as part of the resolution of the latest problem of the Georgian Armed Forces aggression against the South Ossetian during the “five-day war” in August 2008, which led to significant casualties by the civilian population (some of which had Russian citizenship) from the international legal point of view, in our view, could be qualified as an attempt to carry out a national genocide. This is a sufficient legal basis for engaging the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in order to stop this hateful international crime and an armed attack on Russian peacekeepers.
We believe that if the above legal assessment was timely, actively and convincingly brought to the international community, this would significantly reduce the accusations on the part of the West of “unreasonable and excessive use by the Russian Federation of its armed force.” At the same time, we emphasize that the priority of the Russian leadership remains the support of the compatriots living in the CIS countries [7. P. 55 (a)], which were the first to become victims of conflicts in the territory of the Commonwealth.
The peculiarity of the Russian PA in the CIS was also postulated, in our opinion, by the implementation by the country's leadership of a pragmatic and appropriate peacekeeping policy in the context of a rather “cool” attitude of the UN to the implementation of the PO in the Commonwealth and the traditionally hostile reaction of the West to such “illegitimate” actions of “super-autocratic Russia [9. P. 6]. We would also like to stress the geopolitical tendency of “our Euro-Atlantic partners” to the widespread internationalization of crises and the acute shortage of time within which the Russian leadership had to make urgent political decisions on the beginning of the PO and the introduction of Russian peacekeepers into conflict regions of the CIS. Moreover, all this was realized under the conditions of virtually unilateral military-political and material-financial responsibility of Russia for preserving peace in the hot spots of the Commonwealth.
Hence, we believe that, by analogy with the “network diplomacy” and the “principle of moving geometry” (allowing, on the basis of previously created institutions and reached agreements to form a new toolkit for the implementation of the relevant NI [4. P. 4-17]), the PA of the Russian Federation ensuring its NS should be organized on the basis of the so-called “network peacekeeping with variable geometry.” Such a mechanism involves a temporary and flexible ad hoc blocking on a pragmatic basis of any peacekeeping state or other actors with the same interests in the conflict region as Russia.
Given the potential of a peaceful political and diplomatic conflict settlement based on joint actions of the international community [7. Pp. 34, 58], we still believe that the PO of the Russian Federation in the CIS are, first of all, timely, mono-actor external impact on the conflict, the response time to which was predetermined by its parameters and the negative impact on the NS of Russia. At the same time, we believe that in the context of an active implementation by the consolidated West of its multivariate peacekeeping approaches [13. Pp. 40-48; 14. Pp. 28-32] to limit domestic POs to traditional UN peacekeeping operations is impractical from the geopolitical point of view and from the military point of view it is short-sighted and quite dangerous in the future.
It seems that, given the functional incapacity of the CIS to conduct effective POs, it is precisely the CSTO that remains the regional structure, whose leadership and dominance in peacekeeping will increase the strategic influence of the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet space, and will ensure the protection and promotion of its NI, both in the near and far abroad. It is facilitated by the prevailing military and technical presence of Russia in the CSTO countries, its experience and national-state resources for the implementation of a PA that meets the interests of strengthening the NS.
We believe that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in the field of security between Russia, China and the countries of Central Asia (without Turkmenistan) is deprived of such advantages from the point of view of realizing the NI of the Russian Federation.
Recall that the specified regional structure took shape in the mid-1990s in the process of consultations on establishing confidence in the military field in the border regions between the participants of the so-called “Shanghai Five” (Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan). The SCO was officially founded in June 2001 after the sixth state, Uzbekistan, was included in the format of “five” [3].
We emphasize that the SCO, unlike the CSTO, does not have the status of a military-political union, which determines the nature of its activities, which is more anti-terrorist than peacekeeping [8. P. 66], and the spheres of its regional cooperation are focused on humanitarian, economic and scientific-technical issues, and not on the problems of crisis management.
Thus, the following conclusions can be made.
1. The peacekeeping activity of Russia in the CIS, in the absence of a supranational mandate, can be identified as a “specific force peacekeeping” that allows, in the interests of ensuring the national security of the country, its partial departure from a number of general principles of peacekeeping, involvement of the military contingents of the Commonwealth countries and the conflicting parties in the resolution of the peacekeeping tasks.
2. The implementation of the Russian peacekeeping model within the CIS is expressed in a pragmatic-expedient approach of Russia in the interests of increasing its strategic, political and other influence in the Commonwealth in the context of the continued uninterested-neutral attitude of the UN to such operations and the traditionally hostile reaction of leading transatlantic actors to such “autocratic” Russian actions without “sufficient legal grounds.”
3. The specifics of the implementation of the Russian peacekeeping model in the CIS is dictated by the lack of time within which the country's leadership had to make urgent political decisions at the beginning of the peacekeeping operation, the negative impact of conflicts on Russia's national security, regional and international situation.
4. In the interests of strengthening the national security of Russia, it is advisable to use “network peacekeeping with variable geometry,” which implies a temporary and flexible unification of the country on the basis of a pragmatic-expedient approach with state and other peacekeeping actors with the same interests in the conflict region as Russia.
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