MOSCOW. Dec 18 (Interfax) - The UN Secretariat is planning UN peacekeeping presence in Syria, but this seems hardly possible under the current conditions, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told Interfax on Monday.
"The UN Secretariat is indeed looking into various preliminary options for UN peacekeeping presence in Syria, but the political start signal for such an operation can only be given by the UN Security Council, provided a number of conditions are met," Gatilov said.
"For quite understandable reasons, it's impossible to implement this idea as long as large-scale fighting in Syria is going on. In other words, there is no peace for UN peacekeepers to protect, nor a ceasefire for them to monitor," the diplomat said.
As has earlier been reported, the United Nations is considering sending between 4,000 and 10,000 peacekeepers to Syria.
The idea of sending UN peacekeepers to Syria is not new, Gatilov said. "It is periodically comes up in the context of efforts aimed at ending the Syrian crisis. The UN and League of Arab States Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi spoke about it at a recent briefing at the UN Security Council".
The key term for any peacekeeping operation is the consent of the receiving side, the diplomat said.
"In this case, this is the Syrian government. And it has repeatedly signaled that it opposes the deployment of the 'blue helmets' in the absence of a clear-cut line of disengagement between the conflicting parties, while the opposition continues to receive military and material support from the outside. Opposition formations will also have to cooperate with the peacekeepers, but they are equally opposed this as they stake on the military scenario," Gatilov said.
"Apparently, they fear somebody will keep an eye on their military activity," he said.