Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations

Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations

Statement of Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at the Adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution on the Extension of the Mandate of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus

Mr President,

Russia believes, that the adoption of resolution 2453 by the Security Council will contribute to the implementation of the mandate of UN Peacekeeping forces to create safety conditions for the settlement on the island.

Cyprian settlement is one of few questions on the SC agenda, where the united position of its members ensures reliable international support for the efforts of the Cyprian sides to come up with comprehensive settlement based on the UN SC resolutions.

Key to such consensus is a balanced position of the Council and attention to the concerns of the Cyprians themselves.

However we regret to see that one of the delegations attempts to use the sensitive situation on the island to promote their position on the issues that are not directly linked to the settlement. It starts to impede the search for consensus and decreases the effectiveness of the Council’s work.

We would like to remind, that general peacekeeping issues that influence all the UN peacekeeping missions should be discussed in the Special Committee on Peacekeeping with participation of troop-contributing countries. Among such issues is the unfinished strategy of the UN Secretariat on increasing the effectiveness of peacekeeping.

We believe that this work is necessary, however the decision on how such all-encompassing documents would be implemented should be made by the Special Committee after they have studied the documents. Trying to circumvent this body is unacceptable, besides, the Secretariat has not yet finalized the work on the document.

We remind, that the assignment from the Secretary General to apply the nonexistent document to the Mission in Cyprus as well as in Abyei and in the Syrian Golan does not negate the existing practice. The well-established procedures must be observed, including the expertise of the Special Committee on peacekeeping. This body, I quote, “is the only United Nations forum mandated to review comprehensively the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects, including measures aimed at enhancing the capacity of the Organization to conduct United Nations peacekeeping operations”.

In our turn we will ensure, that during the next session of the Special Committee this issue is considered as a priority. This applies, however, to all the documents that need to be endorsed by the UN member-states, including the issues of collecting and analyzing information for peacekeeping purposes.

We hope that the Council members will be more responsible when discussing sensitive country-specific questions and be more respectful to the prerogatives of specialized intergovernmental UN bodies. This will also help us increase the effectiveness of the Security Council.

Thank you.