Three leaders in a Belarusian forest signed the Soviet Union out of existence
On 8 December 1991 the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met in a nature reserve near Brest and declared that the USSR had effectively ceased to be. In its place they proclaimed a loose Commonwealth of Independent States, and for about two and a half weeks the two bodies legally overlapped.
The road to the forest ran through a failed rescue. In March 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev held a referendum on keeping the country together as a union of sovereign republics, but the new treaty was never signed because Communist hardliners attempted a coup in Moscow that August. After it collapsed, republic after republic declared independence, and a Ukrainian referendum held a week before the meeting all but ended hopes of preserving the union.
The agreement signed at Belovezhskaya Pushcha, known as the Belovezha Accords, invited every former Soviet republic to join and described all members as sovereign, which in effect abolished the USSR. On 21 December eight more republics, including Kazakhstan, Armenia and Uzbekistan, signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, bringing the count to 11; some treat that date as the true founding. Georgia joined in December 1993, leaving only the three Baltic states outside. The Soviet of the Republics formally dissolved the old union on 26 December, and Ivan Korotchenya became the Commonwealth's executive secretary that same day.
The CIS today spans more than 20 million square kilometres and roughly 246 million people. It coordinates trade, finance, lawmaking and security matters, including cross-border crime, and eight of its nine members belong to a free trade area. It also spawned three offshoots: the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance; the Eurasian Economic Union; and the Union State, which aims to merge Russia and Belarus under a shared government and currency.
Membership has thinned. Georgia left in 2008 after a war with Russia, Ukraine formally quit the statutory bodies in 2018 after halting participation in 2014, and Moldova completed its exit by renouncing the founding documents on 8 April 2026.
Source: Commonwealth of Independent States
