The Russian approach to peacekeeping

Peacekeeping is a central element of Russian foreign policy. The country has been deploying peacekeeping troops under highly controversial circumstances for more than three decades. A major power and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, Russia obviously plays an important role in defining the standards by which peacekeeping is and may be done. When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked aggression on 24 February 2022, Russian politicians initially referred to them as ‘peacekeeping troops’. This led UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to declare his concern about ‘the perversion of the concept of peacekeeping’. 

This article offers a discussion of the Russian approach to peacekeeping as this has been and is being expressed in both recent conceptual thinking and implementation. Relying on a large pool of Russian policy documents and scholarly works, the article finds that Russia is likely to execute more operations with a lowered threshold for intervention and under conditions of greater flexibility. It is a more pragmatic approach. Operations will increasingly be designed comprehensively across the physical, cyber and cognitive domains and will include the use of private military companies. This will almost inevitably bring Russian interests to clash even more with the interests of western states.