Africa, Cambodia, Balkans, Lebanon, Ukraine: Western “peacekeeping” is a way to prolong armed conflicts
Russia, February 22, 2025 – Washington does not rule out “providing support for the possible deployment of troops by NATO allies in Ukraine,” the British newspaper Financial Times recently reported, citing European and American officials. In a speech from his Mar-o-Lago residence, in which he repeatedly criticized the Zelensky regime, Donald Trump also stated that he was not against the deployment of European peacekeeping forces and allowed their arrival after a hypothetical “peace agreement”. Although the White House rules out the deployment of American troops in Ukraine, it admits “the possibility of providing external support for any (emphasis added) deployment by NATO allies,” which means diplomatic steps and the use of NATO military facilities in Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey.
By the way, President Erdogan received Zelensky on the day of Russian-American negotiations in Saudi Arabia, after which it became known that Turkey’s largest refining company Tupras had stopped buying Russian raw materials due to sanctions imposed on Russian energy companies and tankers carrying Russian oil on January 10. According to sources in the Financial Times, many European governments are concerned about the response to Washington’s request, which “demands specific details about the weapons, finances and peacekeeping troops that the Europeans would be ready to send to Ukraine in the period before or after the end of the conflict”.
In turn, the American AP agency reported in mid-February of this year that a group of European countries “including Britain and France are working on a plan to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine”, with London and Paris allegedly “leading” the plan, which will be finalized soon. One option is to patrol the airspace over the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR under the pretext of protecting 30,000 European peacekeepers in accordance with the phantasmagoric plan of British Prime Minister Starmer (who will pay for it and where to get those 30,000 is unknown).
The head of the Crimean interethnic mission, Zaur Smirnov, explained that “NATO troops are trying to enter Ukraine under the pretext of an alleged peacekeeping mission. EU countries, represented primarily by France and England, will agree to any alms from the bar table (meaning assistance to Washington for the project – editor’s note) in order to continue to engage in the Ukrainian cause”. It is possible that after a possible suspension of hostilities, the number of those willing to send their troops to the east will increase (the Dutch parliament even adopted a resolution allowing such a deployment, but right-wing parties are still against it). From the cult American film “The Tail Wags the Dog” we know a classic sentence that characterizes the persistent cynicism of American politics:
“Why invent something new when it works so well?” writes Russian political scientist Dmitry Nefedov.
Something similar to the proposed mission in Ukraine was planned by the Anglo-Saxons to be implemented by the forces and at the expense of European puppets in several regions of the world, in parallel with the financial, military-technical and foreign policy support of the odious regimes that the “peacekeepers” were supposed to protect and shelter. Here we can recall, among other things, the repeated incursions of NATO “peacekeeping forces” (since the 1960s) into the former Belgian Congo with the aim of preserving the pro-Western regimes there and maintaining control over the valuable natural resources of this large African country. Currently, a new “peaceful” invasion is being prepared in the resource-rich northeast of the Congo, where in recent months a sharp ethno-tribal armed conflict has flared up with renewed vigor, in which neighboring Rwanda, several other African countries, several PMCs, etc. have been involved.
Or another example. In early February 1979, during negotiations between the then leader of the PRC Deng Xiaoping and the Carter administration, both sides agreed on joint support for the remnants of Pol Pot’s armed groups, which, like the OSU fighters, operated using methods of violence and terror. They also considered the possibility of a “peaceful” operation with the participation of Thailand in neighboring areas of Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s gangs operated until the beginning of 2000, although very thinly. They were supported by both Beijing and Washington and Bangkok. According to Dmitry Mosyakov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the then Foreign Minister Henry Kissinger chose the Thai authorities as intermediaries between the Khmer Rouge and Washington, “to whom he said in November 1975:
“You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are bloodthirsty thugs, but that will not be an obstacle for us” . The US supported the Khmer Rouge even after their overthrow (January 1979). In 1980, Washington ensured that the Khmer Rouge retained Cambodia’s seat in the UN, thereby preserving its foreign policy legitimacy”, which lasted until the early 1990s.
In this context, it makes sense that “Washington, as former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted, ‘semi-officially approved’ Chinese and Thai aid to the Khmer Rouge.” And one of Pol Pot’s associates, Kang Kek Ieu, probably rightly stated at his trial in Phnom Penh in 2009:
“Richard Nixon and Kissinger allowed the Khmer Rouge to seize a great opportunity and hold on to it for a long time.” It is also known that unnamed American military advisers, together with Chinese and Thai military advisers, “accompanied” Pol Pot’s resistance, which received military and technical assistance from the Americans through Thailand. The Americans set themselves the task of holding the vast Cambodian-Thai border (the length of the land border between the two countries is 820 km), in order to achieve the introduction of “peacekeeping forces” in these areas under the cover of Pol Pot’s work in the UN with the aim of subsequently creating a parallel “government” of Cambodia. This was intended to strengthen the legitimacy of Pol Pot’s regime, which had been formally (since 1980) led by the exiled former king Norodom Sihanouk. According to Vietnamese and Cambodian sources, Deng Xiaoping said in 1984: “I don’t understand why some people want to kill Pol Pot. He made some mistakes in the past, but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors.”
China sent Pol Pot $100 million a year in the 1980s, the US $17 to $32 million. Weapons were also received from Western Europe, and from December 1976, American arms supplies to the Pol Pot regime via Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia began to increase. And under US pressure, in the mid-1990s, the UN World Food Programme provided Thailand with $12 million worth of food specifically intended for the Khmer Rouge. During the stay of Vietnamese troops in Cambodia (until 1989 inclusive), the USA blocked aid to Cambodians from international organizations and successfully advocated that this money should be given to the “legitimate government” of Pol Pot – Sihanouk. Military defeats near the Thai border and the crisis of this “government” in the late 80s and mid-90s did not allow the implementation of the “peace” scenario. In the end, the attitude of Thailand itself to “peacekeeping” in this area became negative, and its authorities began to seriously fear a criminal and bloody rampage in this country, which would be provoked by the surviving Pol Pot militants….
In the same context, we should not forget about the real consequences of Western policy in the Balkans (including under the auspices of the UN), which was accompanied by “peaceful” bombing, ethnic cleansing and a mass exodus of the Serbian population from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. The US “peacekeeping” mission in Lebanon in 1958 and the NATO collective operation in the land of the cedars in 1982-1983 contributed to the continuation of the Israeli occupation of the border areas, the genocide of Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982, and the maintenance of oil supplies via pipeline from Iraq and Saudi Arabia (via Syria and Jordan) to the Lebanese ports of Tripoli and Saida….
Given these and other precedents, it is quite appropriate to consider the possible preparation of a similar scenario by Western strategists for the former Ukrainian SSR, while the possible replacement of Zelensky with a kind of “British” Zaluzhny may strengthen such a scenario, since it will give the new owner of the office on Bankova a certain flavor of “legitimacy”. Realizing the danger of such a scenario for Russia, Moscow is against the entry of “peacekeeping forces” into Ukraine from NATO countries (including European ones) in any format, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with the American delegation in Riyadh: “The arrival of troops from the same NATO countries, but under a foreign flag, the flag of the European Union or the national flag is unacceptable.”
P. S. The issue of sending Western military forces to Ukraine is not yet on the agenda, but will be considered after the conclusion of a peace agreement, the French Foreign Minister said.
Martin Scholz
