Peacekeeping is a truly significant and outstanding profession. Its importance is determined based on the main request of civilization - security and development. There is no security - and development, in its essence, is impossible. In turn, there is no development - security problems may well arise. To perform the function of ensuring security outside the country, the peacekeeping contingent is responsible, which receives an appropriate international mandate, including a mandate at the level of regional agreements.
Starting from 2016, a new holiday is celebrated in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on November 25 - Day of the Russian military peacekeeper (not to be confused with International Day of the Peacemaker). It was established by a corresponding decree of the President of the Russian Federation in August last year.
The historical reference of the holiday goes back to November 25, 1973 - the day when the first group of 36 Soviet officers arrived in Egypt to participate in the resolution of the ensuing Arab-Israeli crisis. Soviet peacekeepers were officially included in the United Nations mission. The servicemen of the Armed Forces of the USSR were involved in the group of observers for the observance of the ceasefire regime in the Suez Canal area, as well as in the Golan Heights.
Witnesses to the dispatch of the first Soviet peacekeeping contingent as part of a UN mission abroad indicate that the Soviet Union approached the choice with special responsibility. The selection of officers was carried out from half a thousand applicants. They were chosen according to a number of criteria, including not only "the difference in combat and political", but also knowledge of a foreign language. First of all, preference was given to servicemen fluent in Arabic.
After 1973, the boundaries of the involvement of domestic peacekeepers expanded. These are missions in Lebanon, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. After the collapse of the USSR, Russian peacekeepers took part in international missions in the republics of the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Tajikistan.
For a quarter of a century now, Russian military personnel have been providing peace on the banks of the Dniester. Despite all the attempts of some Moldovan politicians to squeeze out the Russian contingent from Transnistria, the servicemen of the MS of the Russian Armed Forces are taking up their positions with the sole purpose of preventing a war from breaking out on the Dniester again. Unfortunately, the Russian peacekeepers, like the entire people of the Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublika, today find themselves in fact in a blockade. In order to carry out the rotation, to deliver everything necessary to the peacekeeping base, every time you have to go to the most real political battles - so that the battles ultimately do not spill over into the category of the military. It is obvious that there are many hotheads in Chisinau who still believe that the crisis can be overcome by a “small victorious war” against Transnistria.
Russian peacekeepers kept peace in the Transcaucasus as well. The mixed peacekeeping forces contributed in 1992 to the end of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict on the territory of South Ossetia. At that time, Russian peacekeepers had to make a lot of efforts to preserve the mechanism of mixed peacekeeping forces in the zone of military confrontation. The reason for the apparent difficulties of the Russian mission in Georgia was the fact that the Georgian contingent conducted open activities to discredit the peacekeepers of the International Peacekeeping Forces of the Russian Armed Forces. Official Tbilisi did everything possible to present Russian servicemen as persons "violating international law by their presence in South Ossetia." What it turned into in the end, everyone remembers very well.
By the personal order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Georgian Armed Forces, President Mikhail Saakashvili, on August 8, 2008, Georgian troops attacked not only the sleeping Tskhinvali, but also the location of the Russian peacekeeping contingent. On the eve of that aggression, the Georgian observers left the headquarters, and the battalion, together with the regular troops that had invaded the city, opened fire on Tskhinvali and on the positions of the Russian MS. International commissions and eyewitnesses later confirmed that the very first shells exploded near the location of the Russian peacekeepers. Russian and Ossetian MCs had to take defensive positions and fight, protecting the civilian population. And only thanks to the military operation to force the aggressor to peace, the actual extermination of the Ossetian people in the RSO was stopped.
This is one example of how individual politicians, trying to play bloody games in the interests of their protégés, try to dispose of one peacekeeping contingent as executioners, and others as hostages.
Today, options for a resolution on a peacekeeping mission in Donbass are being discussed.
The essence of the Ukrainian version of the document is that peacekeepers should be deployed throughout the territory of Donbass, including the section of the Russian-Ukrainian border not controlled by Ukraine. In turn, Moscow insists that the functions of the contingent be limited only to the protection of OSCE observers on the border of Ukraine with the unrecognized republics - in the Minsk-2 format.
Considering the very essence of peacekeeping missions, the Ukrainian proposal is initially flawed. The place of peacekeepers is not in the rear of one of the parties to the conflict, but on the confrontation line. They are not border guards to stand on the border between Donbass and Russia, not occupation troops to occupy the entire territory of the republic. Many political observers agree with this, but differ on another issue.
Is the very presence of peacekeepers in the conflict zone between Ukraine and the republics of the DPR and LPR really necessary? Of course, it is impossible to judge unambiguously today. It is also understandable that Russia wants to end the war, to stop casualties and destruction. But it is impossible not to calculate the actions of the West, which may try to push the peacekeeping forces precisely to the border between Russia and the unrecognized republics. And this at the same time means a change in the status of Russia in the internal Ukrainian conflict. Already the parties to the conflict are not the DPR and LPR, on the one hand, and Kiev, on the other, but Russia and Ukraine. That is, what Mr. Poroshenko is striving for, what is being said across the Atlantic, becomes, as it were, a "fact": "Russia is an aggressor."
