How Boris Yeltsin destroyed the USSR

Moscow: When the leaders of the Soviet Union’s three Slavic republics met at a secluded hunting lodge on Dec. 8, 1991, the fate of the vast country hung in the balance. With a stroke of their pens, they delivered a death blow to the USSR, triggering shockwaves that are still reverberating three decades later in the tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

The agreement they signed at the dacha in Viskuli, in the Belavezha forest near the border with Poland, declared that “the USSR ceases to exist as a subject of international law and as a geopolitical reality.” It also created the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose alliance of ex- Soviet republics that still exists but carries little meaning.

Two weeks later, eight other Soviet republics joined the alliance, effectively terminating the authority of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who stepped down on Dec. 25, 1991, with the hammer and sickle flag lowered over the Kremlin.

Stanislav Shushkevich, the head of the republic of Byelorussia, as Belarus was called at the time, spoke about the signing of the agreement with pride. The accord reached with Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, marked a “diplomatic masterpiece,” he said.

“A great empire, a nuclear superpower, split into independent countries that could cooperate with each other as closely as they wanted, and not a single drop of blood was shed,” added Shushkevich, 86, in an interview.

But that blood would be spilled later — in multiple conflicts across the former Soviet republics once yoked under Moscow’s tight control. One of the deadliest began in eastern Ukraine shortly after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, as Russian- backed separatists battled Ukrainian troops in fighting that has killed over 14,000 people.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev expressed bitterness about the 1991 agreement, which doomed his desperate attempt to save the USSR from collapse by trying to negotiate a new “union treaty” among the republics, an effort he had begun months earlier.

“What they so hastily and stealthily did in Belavezha was like a plot to kill an injured but still living person by dismembering it,” wrote Gorbachev, now 90. “The striving for power and personal interests prevailed over any legal arguments or doubts.” – AP