Moscow on Wednesday warned Westerners of the risky nature of sending a peacekeeping mission, under the aegis of NATO, to Ukraine.
The idea of such a military operation must be officially proposed this Thursday by Poland during the Extraordinary Summit of the Alliance which will be held in Brussels, Belgium.
But the plan “would be a very reckless and extremely dangerous move,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov warned Wednesday in a press conference call. “Any possible contact between our military and NATO military may have foreseeable consequences that are difficult to repair,” according to comments reported by the Reuters news agency.
Carrier idea? Dangerous idea? For the director of the Peace Operations Research Network at the University of Montreal and professor of political science, Marie-Joëlle Zahar, it is above all an “idea that has no possibility of seeing the light of day” , she said, in an interview with Homework. Russia will never accept a NATO presence on Ukrainian territory that would be perceived as a threat to its national security. As for NATO, it is doing everything to prevent this conflict from degenerating into World War III and cannot act in this way without it being perceived by Moscow as a declaration of war”.
It was last week, during his visit to kyiv, the Ukrainian capital placed for more than a month under the pressure of Russian bombardments, that Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski raised the idea of a NATO-led peace in Ukraine. “I think it is necessary to have a peacekeeping mission — from NATO or perhaps from a larger international structure — but a mission that will be able to defend itself, that will operate on Ukrainian territory” , he said at a joint press conference with his counterparts from the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
Two days later, the spokesman for the Polish government, Piotr Müller, clarified that this mission would not aim “to enter into direct conflict with Russia”. These peacekeepers would mainly be deployed in areas of Ukraine that are not occupied by the Russian armed forces and would be intended to send “a clear signal that war crimes will not be accepted”, explained Mr. Muller.
A “total absence of rules”
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s armies have caused the destruction of more than 1,500 civilian buildings and infrastructures, disrupting the daily lives of millions of Ukrainians. Among these targets, we find 23 hospitals, 330 schools, 27 cultural buildings, 98 dedicated to commerce, including 11 related to agriculture and food, according to a count orchestrated by the New York Times in order to document what could constitute evidence that Russia has committed “war crimes”.
“It’s not war, it’s genocide,” Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Iryna Venediktova told AFP on Tuesday. “The theaters of war have rules, principles. What we see in Mariupol [une ville lourdement frappée par les forces russes], it is the total absence of rules. »
In recent days, accusations of the use of ammunition based on white phosphorus by the Russian armies have multiplied in Ukraine. They were reportedly sent to the towns of Popasna and Kramatorsk this week. These weapons, considered as incendiary weapons, can however lead to a violation of international laws when deployed in areas densely occupied by civilians.
“Even the use of chemical weapons could not justify a NATO intervention in Ukraine without derailing the conflict,” said Ms. Zahar. And that is why the Alliance is content for the moment to reinforce its positions, where it can do so”.
In the past, NATO has deployed peacekeeping missions in countries affected by armed conflict, such as Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The role of the troops was then to ensure public safety, but also to assist international humanitarian aid. However, these missions were all launched after the end of the military conflicts.
On Wednesday, on the eve of its extraordinary summit, NATO announced the deployment of four new battlegroups to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, to strengthen its defenses against Russia on its eastern flank. This brings the battlegroups deployed from the Baltic to the Black Sea to eight to date.
In the process, the Secretary General of the Organization, Jens Stoltenberg, spoke of the strengthening of support for Ukraine, “in particular by providing advanced air defense systems, anti-tank systems, different types of weapons and ammunition” , he said.
On Thursday, Alliance members are also due to consider providing Ukraine with “more protective and chemical weapons defense equipment” amid growing White House concerns that the scenario of a chemical weapons attack by Russia from happening, because of the stalemate in the conflict, after a month of war and Ukrainian resistance, and above all the frustrations that this reality, not envisaged by Moscow at the time of attack, can generate in the strongman of the Kremlin.
With Agence France-Presse