Commonwealth of Independent States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Commonwealth of Independent States came into existence on the 8th of December 1991, born inside a forest reserve roughly 50 kilometres north of Brest, Belarus. Three men met at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Natural Reserve and signed a document declaring that the Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist. In its place, they proclaimed an organisation they called the Commonwealth of Independent States. The signatories were the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, and what they produced that day would reshape the political geography of Eurasia for decades. What was this organisation actually meant to do? Who would join, and who would refuse? And why, thirty years on, are member states still arguing about whether to leave?

• 2. Founding in the Forest

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  Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, had spent 1991 trying to hold the country together. In March of that year, he proposed a referendum on preserving the Union as a federation of sovereign republics. That plan collapsed in August when Communist Party hardliners staged a coup attempt in Moscow. The coup failed, but it destroyed what remained of central authority. Republics that had been hesitating now declared independence in rapid succession, fearing that another coup might succeed where the first had not.

  A week after Ukraine held its own independence referendum, the leaders of Byelorussia, Russia, and Ukraine gathered at Belovezhskaya Pushcha and signed the Agreement Establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States, known as the Belovezha Accords. The document declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and announced that a new, looser structure would take its place. The CIS announced it would be open to all former Soviet republics and to other nations sharing its goals.

  On the 21st of December 1991, eight more former Soviet republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol in Kazakhstan: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. That brought the total to eleven participating states. Georgia joined two years later, in December 1993, making twelve of the fifteen former Soviet republics participants. The three non-participants were Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

  The Soviet Union and the CIS briefly co-existed legally before the Soviet of the Republics formally dissolved the USSR on the 26th of December 1991. That same day, Ivan Korotchenya became Executive Secretary of the new organisation.

• 3. Charter and Membership Rules

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  On the 22nd of January 1993, the CIS Charter was signed, creating the formal institutional structure of the organisation. The Charter drew a distinction that would matter enormously in the years that followed: a state that had signed the original creation agreement was a founding state, but only a state that ratified the Charter itself counted as a formal member state.

  This distinction immediately produced a complicated situation. Ukraine had been one of the three co-founders at Belovezhskaya Pushcha, but it never ratified the Charter. It participated in CIS activities without being a member. Turkmenistan was in a similar position until August 2005, when it became an associate member rather than a full one. The cited reason was consistency with its 1995-declared, United Nations-recognised international neutrality status, though analysts also noted that Turkmenistan no longer needed Russia to provide natural gas access.

  Georgia's trajectory moved in the opposite direction. It joined in December 1993 as a full member but formally withdrew in August 2009, one year after the Georgian Parliament voted unanimously to leave in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War. President Saakashvili had announced the decision in a public speech in Tbilisi.

  By the time the Charter was adopted, the CIS had also established the Interparliamentary Assembly, created on the 27th of March 1992 in Kazakhstan. On the 26th of May 1995, CIS leaders signed a convention formalising the Assembly's international legitimacy, eventually ratified by nine parliaments. Georgia was the only CIS member that did not sign. The Assembly is housed in the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg and sends observers to national elections in member states.

• 4. Military and Security Architecture

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  In May 1992, six post-Soviet states signed the Collective Security Treaty, also called the Tashkent Pact. Three more joined in 1993, and the treaty took effect in 1994. When it came up for renewal five years later, three countries withdrew, leaving Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan as members. In 2002 those six states agreed to formalise the arrangement as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a standing military alliance. By 2007, CSTO members had agreed to create a peacekeeping force.

  In December 1993, the CIS Armed Forces Headquarters was abolished. In its place, the CIS Council of Defence Ministers created a Military Cooperation Coordination Headquarters in Moscow, with Russia providing half the funding. General Viktor Samsonov was appointed Chief of Staff. A joint CIS Air Defence System followed in 1995, and over the years its military personnel grew twofold along the western European border of the CIS and by one and a half times on its southern borders.

  The treaty's original purpose included resolving conflicts between CIS members, a mandate that proved almost entirely theoretical. Russia's support for secessionist regions in Georgia, its seizure of Crimea, its stationing of troops in a breakaway part of Moldova, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan all demonstrated that the collective security framework had no practical mechanism for constraining its most powerful member.

• 5. Trade Agreements and Economic Ties

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  On the 15th of April 1994, the presidents of twelve CIS countries met in Moscow and signed an Agreement on the Establishment of a Free Trade Area. The agreement entered into force on the 30th of December 1994 for countries that had completed ratification. On the 2nd of April 1999, eleven of those presidents signed a protocol in Moscow that replaced the earlier bilateral free trade regime with a multilateral one, eliminated tariffs and quantitative restrictions on goods, and established a dispute resolution procedure. Turkmenistan did not participate in the 1999 protocol.

  In October 2011, at a meeting in St. Petersburg, eight CIS prime ministers signed a new multilateral free trade agreement: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. Initially only Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine ratified it, but by the end of 2012 Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Moldova had completed ratification as well. Uzbekistan signed and ratified in December 2013; Kyrgyzstan ratified in January 2014 and Tajikistan in December 2015. Azerbaijan is the only full CIS member state that does not participate in the free trade area.

  On the 8th of June 2023, seven countries signed a further agreement in Sochi covering free trade in services, establishment, operations, and investment: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

  Despite the agreements, corruption and bureaucracy remain identified problems for trade across CIS countries. Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed a digitisation agenda to modernise CIS economies, though the gap between stated ambitions and lived economic conditions remained wide. As of 2015, the average monthly salary across CIS states ranged from around $142 in Tajikistan to $565 in Kazakhstan, and in several countries a majority of the population spent more than half of income on food.

• 6. Human Rights and Election Monitoring

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  Article 33 of the CIS Charter, adopted in 1991, created a Human Rights Commission with its seat in Minsk, Belarus. Four years later, on the 26th of May 1995, the CIS adopted a Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms covering both civil and political rights and social and economic rights. The treaty entered into force in 1998. It was modelled on the European Convention on Human Rights but lacks the enforcement mechanisms of that document, and the Human Rights Commission's authority was described as vaguely defined.

  The CIS Election Monitoring Organisation was formed in October 2002, following a heads-of-state meeting that adopted a Convention on the Standards of Democratic Elections. Scholars have characterised CIS election monitoring as low-quality, with a consistent pattern of validating elections that independent observers found deeply flawed. During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, the CIS observation team questioned the result and called it illegitimate, while the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe found no significant problems. The CIS praised Uzbekistan's 2005 parliamentary elections as legitimate, free and transparent while the OSCE said those elections had fallen significantly short of international standards. The same divergence repeated in Tajikistan's 2005 parliamentary elections and in Kyrgyzstan's 2005 parliamentary elections, the latter followed almost immediately by large-scale protests over what opposition groups called a rigged result.

  In 2005 Moldova refused to invite CIS observers to its parliamentary elections, an action Russia criticised. Scores of observers from Belarus and Russia were prevented from entering the country.

• 7. Departures and Contractions

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  Between 2003 and 2005, three CIS member states experienced changes of government through what became known as colour revolutions: Eduard Shevardnadze was overthrown in Georgia, Viktor Yushchenko was elected in Ukraine, and Askar Akayev was toppled in Kyrgyzstan. In February 2006, Georgia withdrew from the CIS Council of Defense Ministers, stating that it could not belong to two military structures simultaneously while pursuing NATO membership. It remained a full CIS member until August 2009.

  In March 2007, Igor Ivanov of the Russian Security Council publicly expressed doubts about the usefulness of the CIS, suggesting that the Eurasian Economic Community was becoming a more capable forum for the organisation's largest members. After Georgia left, the presidents of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan all skipped the October 2009 CIS meeting, each citing their own disagreements with Russia.

  Ukraine's departure unfolded over years. On the 19th of May 2018, President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree formally ending Ukraine's participation in CIS statutory bodies, though the CIS secretariat confirmed it had received no formal withdrawal notice. On the 3rd of May 2023, Ukraine formally withdrew from the 1992 agreement establishing the Interparliamentary Assembly. On the 26th of March 2026, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha announced that the government had decided to withdraw from another 116 CIS treaties.

  Moldova's exit followed a longer legislative path. On the 2nd of April 2026, the Parliament of Moldova voted 60 out of 101 deputies in favour of denouncing the CIS Creation Agreement, the Alma-Ata Protocol, and the CIS Charter. President Maia Sandu promulgated the laws on the 8th of April 2026. Under the CIS Charter's own rules, withdrawal takes effect twelve months after formal notification, placing Moldova's full exit on the 8th of April 2027. At the time of the vote, public polling showed that 53.3% of Moldovans supported leaving, compared to 32% opposed.

• 8. Assessments From Inside and Out

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  Abulfaz Elchibey, the second president of Azerbaijan, offered one of the sharpest critiques from within the organisation's own membership. He called the CIS a "big collective farm" that Russia used to "preserve the old empire," arguing that the rights of member states were never genuinely protected and that CIS leaders had never made a serious attempt to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict or any other conflicts in the post-Soviet space.

  Russian diplomat A. Denisov pushed back against the imperial framing, pointing out that the CIS operates on consensus and that any participating state holds a veto over any decision. He described the principle of "moving geometry" under which states choose which projects to join and which to avoid, and called talk of imperial ambitions "just ridiculous."

  Mikhail Krotov, who headed the Council of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly from 1992 to 2012, argued that in order to accommodate Ukraine, the CIS founding documents had already significantly reduced the level of integration and excluded supranational functions from CIS bodies. He noted that Ukraine did not sign even that weakened version of the Charter.

  American geopolitician Zbigniew Brzezinski offered a different conclusion: that it was Ukraine's actions that prevented the CIS from becoming simply a new name for a more federal Soviet Union. Whether that reads as praise or criticism depends on the reader's vantage point. With Moldova's formal exit set for April 2027, the organisation that began with twelve members will have seen three states depart, while the nine who remain continue debating how much integration they actually want.