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LVIV, Ukraine — At least 35 people were killed and 134 people injured when a Russian airstrike hit a military base in western Ukraine about 20 miles from the Polish border, Ukrainian officials said Sunday. “The airstrike was carried out from the Black and Azov seas,” Lviv regional administration head Maksym Kozytskiy, said in a Telegram post, which confirmed the number of dead an injured. He added that around 30 missiles had hit the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security in Yavoriv.

Former CIA Director John Brennan said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “badly miscalculated” when he invaded Ukraine. Brennan said, “I think it’s a combination of, he has now his own prism of looking at the world and Ukraine. Also, I think he has badly miscalculated because I don’t think he has anticipated the consequences and the reaction inside Ukraine, where nationalism runs strong and deep. So I do believe that what we’re going to be seeing in the coming days and weeks is going to be fierce, fierce Ukrainian resistance to this. Even though the Ukrainian...

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday condemned Israel's "violence" towards Gaza and suggested an international peacekeeping force could protect Gazans in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The peacekeeping force could be made of civilian observers, an armed military, or a police force. Guterres also proposed increasing humanitarian aid. His suggestions come after the submission of a 14-page report requested by the General Assembly in June response to a surge of violence in Gaza. On Friday night, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon emphasized that "the only protection the Palestinian people need is from their own leadership." "Instead of...

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley has confirmed that going forward, the U.S. will pay no more than 25 percent of its peacekeeping costs. Associated Press reported she told a Security Council meeting this week, “Peacekeeping is a shared responsibility. All of us have a role to play, and all of us must step up.” The international group assessed the United States 28.5 percent of the $7.3 billion spending this year. But that broke the 25 percent limit established in U.S. law and Haley informed the government officials in the U.N. that’s the cap, starting with this year’s peacekeeping budget. But still,...

Liberals around the world should have figured out by now that President Trump isn’t bluffing when he threatens action. When the administration reported that it was going to hold the U.N. accountable for their duplicity and reprehensible anti-Israel agenda, no one believed it.

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UNITED NATIONS – The deal looked simple enough: U.S. military equipment suppliers bribed an African defense minister's salesmen to secure part of a $15 million gig to outfit a presidential guard. But the salesmen were actually FBI agents. And the operation resulted in what U.S. authorities in January called their biggest foreign bribery sting to date, netting 16 indictments and 22 arrests of small arms and military equipment makers. At the center of the U.S. case is Richard Bistrong, a former Florida executive who first surfaced in a series of cases of bribes and bid-rigging for multimillion-dollar U.N. peacekeeping contracts....

TOKYO — Japan plans to draw up a law to speed the deployment of troops overseas for peacekeeping operations and to support allies, reports said Sunday, in a move that could strain relations with neighbours wary about Japan’s wartime history.

SHOULD the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban ki-Moon, get his way, a newcomer will appear in the skies over eastern Congo. He has asked the Security Council to approve unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, for use in the troubled region. Supporters of their use, including the UN's head of peacekeeping operations, Hervé Ladsous, face a diplomatic battle to get their hands on any drones. China and Russia are reluctant to back their deployment. Rwanda, which has one of the rotating seats on the Security Council, and is accused of meddling in Congo, has also opposed their...

At least three people were hurt on Friday as dozens of armed terrorists, affiliated with the Salafi movement of Islam, stormed the international peacekeeping force base in the Sinai Peninsula, near the Gaza-Israel border. They were protesting the controversial film mocking the prophet Mohammed which has resulted in protests throughout the Arab world. Channel 10 News cited reports in the Egyptian media which said the Muslims broke into the base and torched it. The report quoted one senior official as having told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Saba that shots were fired from within the base at firefighters who came to...

ast night, Nobel Peace Prize Winning President Obama gave a speech justifying a third simultaneous military conflict. I can't call it a war, because President Obama didn't find it necessary to declare one. In his speech, Obama says that America has "a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom" Well, that's sort of encouraging. At least it would be if I thought Obama actually meant it. It's vaguely possible to believe Obama is acting as the world's police man. After all, we are no involved in 3 simultaneous military conflicts. I argue...

Rather than any international peacekeeping mission, the best course is bilateral security arrangements.  The Israeli experience with an international presence has been poor. UNIFIL in Lebanon has not lived up to Israeli expectations in preventing the re-armament of Hizbullah after the 2006 Second Lebanon War.  For more on defensible borders to secure Israel's future, see this piece by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan -  http://www.jcpa.org/text/security/dayan.pdf  and www.defensibleborders.org.  

Have you ever had an argument with someone at school? Maybe it started between the two of you at lunch or in the schoolyard. At first, you yelled at each other. Later, you may have pushed and shoved each other. Your friends thought you were right and took your side. Other students took the other side. Suddenly, schoolmates became enemies and a simple disagreement turned into a major conflict.

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - The United Nations on Thursday feted 60 years of peacekeeping around the world, with its overstretched "blue helmets" in high demand but somewhat tarnished by sex abuse and corruption scandals. "Today, we have more than 110,000 men and deployed in conflict zones around the world," UN chief Ban Ki-moon said in a message to mark International Day of Peacekeepers. "They come from nearly 120 countries, an all-time high, reflecting confidence in United Nations peacekeeping," he said. And Jean-Marie Guehenno, the Frenchman who has led the UN peacekeeping department (DPKO) for the past eight years, also paid...

Is the United Nations A Symbol of False Hope? by: Emmanuel Opati, November 27, 2007 The United Nations has come under criticism for lack of actions to avert genocides during the last decade, raising questions as to whether it is complicit with evil. It was said that the UN Secretariat staff who portray themselves as impartial civil servants waiting for instructions from the Security Council have largely undermined the core rationale for its establishment. The preamble of United Nations Charter states that the UN is “determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime...

Whenever there is an armed conflict in the world, someone, somewhere, will propose a U.N. peacekeeping force as the solution. I'm sure you've noticed the way internationalists always suggest the United Nations is the best vehicle for solving global crises. Well, almost always. There is, however, one conflict in the world today about which I have never heard such a proposal offered – and I don't expect I ever will. It also happens to be the most hotly debated conflict in the world today – the war in Iraq. Isn't that interesting? What do you suppose it means? What is...

BEIRUT, Lebanon - A bomb apparently targeting U.N. peacekeepers exploded by the side of a road in southern Lebanon on Sunday, killing four Spanish troops and injuring at least four, a senior Lebanese security official said. The senior official in Beirut said a mine may have caused the explosion, but another security official based in southern Lebanon said a bomb detonated at the side of a road about four miles north of the Israeli border town of Metulla. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Nine members of a multinational peacekeeping force, eight of them French, were killed Sunday when their plane crashed while attempting an emergency landing in northern Egypt. "Nine people on board the plane died in the crash. This included eight French crew members and one Canadian," an Egyptian security official told AFP on condition of anonymity. The Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) and French military sources said they had received reports that a French transport aircraft belonging to the peacekeeping force had crashed but did not immediately confirm any casualties. According to Egyptian security sources on the crash site, the light...

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday whether some of the city's police officers could be deployed with U.N. peacekeeping missions. Recruiting police for the U.N.'s 16 peacekeeping missions around the globe has been historically challenging. "New York City has one of the most diversified police forces around and I think the secretary-general would like to explore possibilities," U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said before the meeting. "Getting police to join peacekeeping operations is one of the high priorities for the U.N." Bloomberg left the meeting without speaking to reporters. Stu Loeser, the...

Criticizing the United Nations for not being more "effective" or "forceful" in places like Darfur misses a very important point. The main objective of UN peacekeeping is to keep conflicts from disturbing the major powers, not necessarily the same thing as making peace. Thus we have the spectacle of the UN standing aside as Arab death squads keep killing African Moslems in Darfur. Why? Because the Arab world does not want another Arab government criticized for condoning mass murder. Pretend it isn't happening, and we'll keep the oil flowing. No one is immune to this sort of thing. When the...