Belovezha Accords

The Belovezha Accords, officially the Agreement on the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States and also called the Minsk Agreement, declared that the Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist and set up the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. They were signed on 8 December 1991 at the state dacha near Viskuli in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, Belarus, by the leaders of three of the four republics that had signed the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR: Stanislav Shushkevich and Vyacheslav Kebich for Belarus, Boris Yeltsin and Gennady Burbulis for Russia, and Leonid Kravchuk and Vitold Fokin for Ukraine. A protocol to the agreement was signed on 21 December 1991. In 1994 the CIS Economic Court ruled that the 1991 agreements are the constituent and founding documents of the Commonwealth, ranking above its Charter.