When Ukraine’s Independence Hastened the End of the USSR

When on December 12, 1991, a visibly dismayed Mikhail Gorbachev was asked about the agreement that had been agreed behind his back, four days earlier, by the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine: Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Shushkévich and Leonid Kravchuk respectively , which ended the existence of the USSR to give rise to another integrationist model: the Commonwealth of Independent States or CIS; resigned, Gorbachev, who then held the leadership of the Soviet State, sentenced in prophetic terms: “… what will happen to the borders? They will have borders that will separate them and each republic will have its own armed forces. I fear that the Commonwealth of Independent States is a ticking time bomb.”

In this sense, those responsible for the negotiations also included the following statement in order to make it clear that the disintegration process was already underway: “as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality, the Soviet Union ends its existence” . But what geopolitical reality were the signatories referring to? The coup attempt of August 1991 that undermined Gorbachev’s political authority and the bloody civil war that bled the former Yugoslavia. But there was another extenuating circumstance, on December 1 of that same year, the Ukrainian electorate held two electoral processes, to elect its new president and a referendum to emancipate itself from the Soviet Union, Leonid Kravchuk won with more than 60% of the votes. and, for independence, 90% of the voters leaned.

The secession of Ukraine was the reason why Boris Yeltsin approached his Belarusian counterpart in order to convince Kravchuk that it was time to hasten the inevitable if he wanted to avoid an outbreak between neighboring republics as in the Balkans. But there was another concern at the door, how would Russia recover the nuclear missiles distributed between Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan? For the moment, the parties involved agreed to create a joint command on a temporary basis that would assume custody of the Soviet arsenals while the liquidation of the USSR was completed.

With the Belavezha agreement, Yeltsin managed to remove Mikhail Gorbachev from power, temper Ukraine’s pro-independence spirit and restore another federal formula. Regarding the recovery of the devices of mass destruction, Yeltsin had the support of the North American president, George Bush Sr., who sent the Secretary of State, James Baker, in order to negotiate the repatriation of the nuclear silos, since a good part of the The long-range strategic arsenal was still aimed at US soil, and the Bush administration had made it clear that Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan should hand over their silos without expecting anything in return. Russia would be the only nuclear power recognized by Washington and that is how Yeltsin achieved the denuclearization of his neighbors. At the end of 1991, the geostrategic imperatives of the United States and Russia strangely coincided, after witnessing the dismantling of the Soviet empire, their foreign ministries maneuvered so that a nuclear power with high standards of industrial and agricultural production and latent territorial differences. Thirty-one years after the Belavezha Agreement, the postmortem rattles of the former Soviet Union still prevail.

CURRICULUM PROFILE OF THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Víctor Francisco Olguín Monroy and member of the Study and Reflection Unit on Russia and Ukraine of COMEXI. Professor of International Relations, professor and guest lecturer at CESNAV and researcher at ININVESTAM.