World Politics Review

Global Insider: Russian Peacekeeping Grows with Russian Self-Identity

Posted By The Editors 10 Feb 2012 Russia announced last month that it plans to withdraw its eight helicopters and the 120 personnel who service them from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan. In an email interview, Alexander Nikitin, director of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Security at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and president emeritus of the Russian Political Science Association, discussed Russia’s involvement with international peacekeeping.

WPR: What has been Russia's recent involvement in international peacekeeping activities?

Alexander Nikitin: Current Russian participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations remains on a quite low level for a great power and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. In 2010, Russia occupied 39th place among peacekeeper providers, falling to 51st in 2011. In the fall of 2011, Russia supplied 225 uniformed peacekeepers: 135 military, 68 military observers and 22 police. No civilian peacekeepers have been sent in recent years.

From 2000 to 2011, Russian participation fluctuated between 220 and 370 personnel, remaining basically level after the withdrawal of Russian peacekeeping contingents from the former Yugoslavia. Geographically, Russian peacekeepers are working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Western Sahara, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, East Timor, Kosovo and the Middle East. Russian financial contributions to U.N. peacekeeping activities were $160 million in financial year 2010/2011, making up 2 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.

At the same time, however, Russia occupies second place in the market for U.N. peacekeeping supply purchases. Russian companies currently possess contracts -- almost entirely for aviation transportation services -- worth $382 million, which makes up 14 percent of U.N. peacekeeping services.

WPR: What domestic and international concerns are most important for Russia when choosing whether or not to participate in a peacekeeping mission?

Nikitin: Generally, Russia continues to be a principal supporter of the U.N. system as a whole, and of the U.N. role in international peacekeeping in particular. In 2011, Russia increased its financial contribution to the U.N. peacekeeping budget and the U.N. Peacebuilding Fund. As part of its ongoing military reform program, Russia is systematizing the training of its peacekeepers and special forces elements, and may be ready to slightly increase its supply to international peacekeeping, both in personnel and especially in peacekeeping-related services such as transportation.

At the same time, Russia has drawn the relevant conclusions from three current trends: the U.N.’s tendency to delegate peacekeeping functions to regional organizations; the increase in the number of peace operations carried out by organizations such as the European Union and NATO; and the visibly higher rate at which national contributions to EU and NATO operations are rising, compared to contributions to U.N. operations. As a result of these trends, Russia has begun to concentrate on efforts to create a regional system of conflict resolution and peacekeeping based in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which includes promoting regional CSTO Peacekeeping Forces. This is perceived as a much more promising track than adding hundreds of Russian military, police or civilian peacekeepers into the general U.N. pool.

WPR: How is Russia's involvement in peacekeeping missions viewed domestically and internationally?

Nikitin: The main factor limiting Russian readiness to participate in international operations in conflict areas is a kind of “post-imperial” syndrome that infected Russian social psychology after the collapse of the Soviet Union, akin to the U.S. “post-Vietnam syndrome.”

After the 1990s, with the idea that Moscow might repeat distant and ideologically motivated engagements firmly in the past, the self-perception of Russia as a “large but regional” power overtook the previous perception of a “global power.”

This limited regionalism was supported by the perception of post-Soviet Russia’s military and geostrategic weakness. Russian military forces proved to be far from decisively strong in domestic conflicts in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus. Several successive military reforms, including the most recent and deepest one in 2010-2011, made providing military and police forces as peacekeepers less of a priority, even as the best-equipped and best-trained national military forces were involved in regional conflict-resolution efforts in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Only near the end of the 2000s did the national mentality start to recover from the post-Soviet syndrome, allowing the country’s leadership to gradually begin the process of re-establishing Russia’s global presence and putting a global role back on the national agenda.

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