Belavezha Accords

The Belavezha Accords is the agreement signed at the state dacha in the Bia.a Forest (a.k.a. Belovezhskaya Pushcha) on December 8, 1991, by the Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich), which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. While Belavezha Accords doubts remained over their authority to dissolve the Union, on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR and turned the powers of his office over to Boris Yeltsin, de facto accepting the dissolution of the Soviety Union.