What is the Commonwealth of Independent States?
Following the Ukrainian referendum, on December 8, 1991, the leaders of the three Slavic republics of the Soviet Union— Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—proclaimed the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a regional coordinating organization for the Soviet successor states.
All the other republics, except Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, eventually signed the relevant protocol to become member states. The leaders' aim was twofold. On the one hand, they needed to invent a quasi-legal procedure that would present the Soviet Union's dissolution as a collective decision. On the other, they wanted to reassure the population that the Soviet collapse would not mean the severance of economic and cultural ties among the republics. Apparently the organization's founders did not intend to create a more structured political union.Tensions among the member states soon developed. As Yeltsin's economic and democratic reforms faltered, his administration increasingly adopted the rhetoric of Russian great-power chauvinism. Other former republics, Ukraine in particular, also responded to the economic collapse of the early 1990s by blaming everything on Russia's past and present imperial ambitions. Within the CIS, Russia soon found itself promoting closer cooperation, whereas Ukraine resisted any such efforts, especially in the fields of joint security and legislative coordination. In 1993 Ukraine refused to ratify the organization's charter, thus officially becoming a “participant state” rather than a “member state." It was, however, interested in remaining part of the de facto free-trade zone existing within CIS, which was formalized in 1994 and again in 1999.
Since the mid-1990s, Russia has worked to create a closer economic and political union within the CIS. Its first incarnation was the 1996 Customs Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
In 2000 Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan joined these three states to create the grander-sounding Eurasian Economic Community. In January 2015 this entity was transformed into the Eurasian Economic Union with six post-Soviet states as members. Although the CIS continues to exist, Russia has increasingly focused its energies on developing this Eurasian Union, which Ukraine has never joined. Under governments of various political stripes, both those seen as pro-Russian and pro-Western, Ukraine's policy toward the CIS and its derivative projects remained remarkably consistent. Ukraine participated in CIS free-trade agreements, ratifying the most recent of them in 2011, but refrained from taking part in most other policycoordinating projects.The post-Soviet states have not viewed membership or participation in the CIS as an obstacle to cooperation and closer ties with the European Union. In 2009 six members and participants of the CIS, including Ukraine and Belarus, joined the EU's Eastern Partnership program. Nevertheless, some CIS institutions have been used to promote Russia's regional interests at the expense of other member states. Relations between Ukraine and the CIS worsened briefly in 2005, for example, when the CIS election-monitoring mission, in deference to Russian objections, initially refused to endorse the repeat runoff elections in Ukraine that brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power.
However, the most recent conflict between Ukraine and Russia emerged not in relation to the CIS but, rather, resulted from Russia's attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into joining the Eurasian Economic Union. In November 2013 the Yanukovych administration yielded to Russian pressure by abandoning its plan to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. This about-face proved to be the last straw for many Ukrainians, who launched a popular revolution. Following Russia's annexation of the Crimea and involvement in the Donbas war, in December 2014 Ukrainian MPs tabled a bill that would formalize the country's withdrawal from the CIS.