Ukraine withdraws from 116 treaties with Russia, Belarus, CIS
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha (Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine / Twitter)
Ukraine has decided to withdraw from 116 international treaties concluded with Russia, Belarus and within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), finally breaking away from its Soviet-era contractual legacy, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on Facebook on March 26.
“My firm conviction is that Ukraine’s treaty and legal framework must correspond to the realities of war and the new security architecture on the European continent,” Sybiha wrote. “For this, we need to cut the last legal threads that once bound us to the Russian Federation, Belarus and the so-called CIS.”
According to the minister, Ukraine has terminated 25 agreements, denounced three more and withdrawn from 88 international treaties. Among them: five are bilateral with Russia, 23 with Belarus, 87 within the CIS framework, and one is a trilateral agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
The Foreign Ministry noted that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had previously signed decrees on Ukraine’s exit from 31 CIS treaties, while 14 bills on terminating 74 agreements were registered in the Ukrainian parliament.
“This is my principled position as minister — to get rid of everything that can weaken Ukraine, to cut off everything that once connected us with the aggressor state, and to build a serious, strategic and long-term line of defense for the free world on Ukraine’s eastern border — or better yet, even further beyond it,” Sybiha said.
In 1991, the founding republics of the Soviet Union signed the Belovezha Accords, which declared the end of the USSR and the creation of the CIS. The founding members of the USSR in 1922 were the RSFSR (Russia), the Ukrainian SSR (Ukraine), the Byelorussian SSR (Belarus), and the Transcaucasian SFSR (Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, comprising Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia).
Ukraine suspended its participation in the CIS statutory bodies in 2018 but was never a full member, as it never ratified the CIS Charter.
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