Three former top Soviet officials on Friday marked the signing 25 years ago of the treaty that formally dissolved the Soviet Union, using the occasion to urge dialogue on the deadly separatist conflict in Ukraine.
On Dec. 8, 1991, the leaders of the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed a pact that broke up the USSR. Negotiations were held in secret in a government hunting lodge in Belarus and the pact defeated the efforts of then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to keep the country together.
One of the signatories, Stanislav Shushkevich, then head of the Belarussian parliament, said that the deal helped avoid civil wars and other calamities that could have resulted from the breakup of the world’s largest country and one with a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“There was a nuclear power which was threatening the entire world with nuclear missiles and to say that it will cease to exist, one must be not just a philosopher, but a philosopher with a touch of heroism,” Shushkevich said at an event at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
Gennady Burbulis, a close aide of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin — who signed the document with his boss — said the Soviet Union was a doomed totalitarian state.
“Historically speaking ... the Soviet Union was an inviable entity from the get-go,” Burbulis said. “The repressions of the system were an anthropological catastrophe.”
Twenty-five years later, the region is again in turmoil. In 2014, after protesters toppled a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and threw its support behind separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. About 10,000 people have been killed.
Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, who also signed the Belavezha agreement, said it was important to continue talks, while also exerting economic pressure on Russia.
“My position is the same as of those countries that imposed the sanctions,” Kravchuk said.
“At the same time, I agree that you will not achieve order in the world only through sanctions,” he said.
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