Formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States
On December 8, 1991, the leaders of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk), and Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich) met at a hunting lodge in the Białowieża Forest near Minsk and signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a loose successor framework. The three men, representing the three Slavic founding republics of the original 1922 Soviet Union, acted without consulting Gorbachev — the sitting President of the USSR — or the other twelve Soviet republics. Gorbachev learned of the decision when Yeltsin called US President Bush before calling him. Within days, eight more Soviet republics joined the CIS through the Alma-Ata Declaration of December 21, bringing the total to eleven (the Baltic republics and Georgia declined to join). The CIS was not a successor state to the USSR but a loose consultative body with no supranational authority; Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN Security Council seat and nuclear arsenal. The formation of the CIS ended the Soviet Union as a legal entity and created fifteen independent successor states, most of which had little institutional preparation for independence. For Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus — the three signatories — the Belavezha meeting was both a formal dissolution and the first assertion of their separate post-Soviet national identities.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
