China’s willingness to be part of a hypothetical UN peacekeeping mission in Ukraine is not new in itself. But it could complicate the historical problems of multilateral military operations, especially in the field of cybersecurity by Andrea Monti – Originally published in Italian on Italian Tech – La Repubblica
China is extremely active in UN-authorised peacekeeping missions, and involving it in a possible coalition to ensure peace in Ukraine would not, in itself, be an out-of-the-box choice. Beijing’s first involvement in an international peacekeeping mission dates back to 1989 and, according to UN data, China is currently the eighth largest contributor to international peacekeeping and police missions in terms of personnel, surpassing even other members of the UN Security Council.
With regard to Ukraine, however, despite some initial reports of its potential involvement in the coalition of the willing, it seems unlikely that this will happen without a UN mandate. Nevertheless, this debate provides an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between peacekeeping missions and the pursuit of national interests, even under the banner of the United Nations.
The secondary, but no less important, objectives of peacekeeping missions
Although formally fuelled by ‘good intentions’, participation in peace missions is in reality motivated by the foreign policy needs of the countries contributing to stabilisation operations and by the opportunity to build direct relations with local governments, gather first-hand information on the military capabilities of other contributors and expand their own operational and intelligence capabilities.
In other words, this means generating ‘influence’, ‘practising’ combat in foreign lands where it would otherwise be impossible and — through proximity to the forces of other participants — spying on the actors involved.
It is obviously possible to simulate various operational scenarios within one’s own borders, and it is true that technology now allows for the collection of enormous amounts of information without physically entering the structures of the ‘surveilled’ country. However, nothing compares to direct contact for acquiring experience and data that would otherwise be almost impossible to obtain. This applies not only to the level of personnel training, equipment and procedures, but also and above all to the possibility of recruiting individuals willing to spy on their own country and directly attack the security of communication and information exchange systems.
Peace missions and loss of control over information
The complexities of being forced to interact, willingly or unwillingly, with military structures of other countries, whether like-minded or not, are well known and have resulted in the adoption of very strict protocols regarding how to operate and communicate.
On the one hand, the UN, although it does not have its own intelligence agency, has formalised its own manual to regulate its intelligence and surveillance activities in the country ‘hosting’ the peacekeeping mission. Therefore, in theory, in the interests of common security, all participants should share what they learn through a series of active measures. However, in addition to being an entity that actively collects information, the UN and peacekeeping missions can also be passive subjects of espionage.
A study published in 2024 by the International Peace Institute and taken up by the French Ministry of Defence highlights how information generated during a peacekeeping mission is exposed to a significant risk of circulating out of control: ‘…internal trends in intelligence, surveillance and data management technologies make missions more vulnerable to cyber threats. Mission networks are storing new types of highly sensitive data in more centralised and structured systems and formats. While this increasing centralisation has some advantages in terms of cyber security, it makes the work of those seeking this information easier as it is concentrated in one place, and risks exposing sensitive information. In addition, procedures for managing surveillance and intelligence equipment owned by intervention forces can effectively remove UN control over how certain data is used and managed.
Mutual information gathering
Another issue concerns the information activities that each contingent deployed in the theatre of operations carries out with regard to the others.
It is a fact that even allies spy on each other. Just remember a few historical cases: Crypto AG was a Swiss company that, until 1993, sold ‘weakened’ encryption machines on behalf of the German and American secret services to facilitate interception; in 2009, the United Kingdom was ‘caught’ reading the emails of G20 diplomats, and between 2012 and 2014, a joint operation between the United States and Finland made it possible to spy on important European politicians. It is therefore not surprising that even in the context of a peace mission, everyone may decide to take the opportunity to increase, by any means, their knowledge of friends, non-enemies and adversaries. This explains why, in practice, the information exchanged remains (or should remain) to the bare minimum and is essentially limited (or should be limited) to tactical needs, i.e. those related to operations in the field.
Is the UN the Achilles’ heel of information security?
Given the above, it is realistic to assume that Chinese participation in an international peacekeeping mission in Ukraine could translate into operational and informational advantages for Beijing (but also for the other actors involved), particularly with regard to the collection of intelligence in the field.
Therefore, it is equally conceivable that the presence in Ukraine of contingents belonging to countries with strategic interests that are not entirely aligned but with comparable technological capabilities implies the need for each to adopt extremely rigorous security measures.
However, the fact that in peacekeeping missions the rules on information management are only partly dictated by the UN makes it less easy to achieve an adequately high level of security.
The United Nations has adopted a strategy for the transformation of peacekeeping operations that takes into account issues related to infrastructure, communications and data security, but the scale of the complexities to be managed is such that no reasonable solution can be envisaged in the short term.
This is all the more likely given that none of the countries involved seems willing to take a step back from protecting their national interests in favour of achieving the objectives set by the UN, and therefore to seriously accept a commitment to limit their information gathering activities by excluding from their targets the international organisations of which they are themselves members.