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| See also: | Other events of 1991 List of years in Ukraine | ||||
Events in the year 1991 in Ukraine .
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| See also: | Other events of 1991 List of years in Ukraine | ||||
Events in the year 1991 in Ukraine .
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Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, and historically Byelorussia, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Covering an area of 207,600 square kilometres (80,200 sq mi) and with a population of 9.3 million, Belarus is the 13th-largest and the 20th-most populous country in Europe. The country is administratively divided into seven regions. Minsk is the capital and largest city.
The Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Union Republics were ethnically based administrative units of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Soviet Union was created by the treaty between the soviet socialist republics of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and the Transcaucasian Federation, by which they became its constituent republics. For most of its history, the USSR was a highly centralized state despite its nominal structure as a federation of republics; the decentralization reforms during the era of Perestroika ("Restructuring") and Glasnost ("Openness") conducted by Mikhail Gorbachev are cited as one of the factors which led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
The Commonwealth of Independent States is a regional intergovernmental organization in Eastern Europe and Asia. It was formed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It covers an area of 20,368,759 km2 (7,864,422 sq mi) and has an estimated population of 239,796,010. The CIS encourages cooperation in economic, political and military affairs and has certain powers relating to the coordination of trade, finance, lawmaking, and security. It has also promoted cooperation on cross-border crime prevention.
The politics of Belarus takes place in a framework of a presidential republic with a bicameral parliament. The President of Belarus is the head of state. Executive power is exercised by the government, at its top sits a prime minister, appointed by the President. Legislative power is de jure vested in the bicameral parliament, the National Assembly, however the president may enact decrees that are executed the same way as laws, for undisputed time.
START I was a bilateral treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the reduction and the limitation of strategic offensive arms. The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994. The treaty barred its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers.
The 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, also known as the August Coup, was a failed attempt made by communist hard-liners of the Soviet Union to take control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the party. The coup leaders consisted of top military and civilian officials who formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP). They were hard-line opponents of Gorbachev's reform program, angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states, and fearful of the New Union Treaty that was about to be signed. The treaty decentralized much of the central government's power to the 15 republics. The hard-liners were poorly organized. They met defeat by a short but effective campaign of anticommunist protestors, mainly in Moscow, led by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who had been both an ally and critic of Gorbachev. The coup collapsed in only two days and Gorbachev returned to office, while all the plotters lost office. Yeltsin became the dominant leader and Gorbachev lost much of his influence. The failed coup led to both the immediate collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the USSR four months later.
The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany , or the Two Plus Four Agreement , is an international agreement that allowed the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s. It was negotiated in 1990 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the treaty, the Four Powers renounced all rights they held in Germany, allowing a reunited Germany to become fully sovereign the following year. At the same time, the two German states agreed to confirm their acceptance of the existing border with Poland, and accepted that the borders of Germany after unification would correspond only to the territories then administered by West and East Germany, with the exclusion and renunciation of any other territorial claims.
The post-Soviet states, also known as the former Soviet Union (FSU), the former Soviet Republics and in Russia as the near abroad, are the 15 sovereign states that were union republics of the Soviet Union; that emerged and re-emerged from the Soviet Union following its dissolution in 1991.
The Belovezh Accords are accords forming the agreement that declared the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had effectively ceased to exist and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place as a successor entity. The documentation was signed at the state dacha near Viskuli in Belovezhskaya Pushcha (Belarus) on 8 December 1991, by leaders of three of the four republics which had signed the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR:
The Cold War period of 1985–1991 began with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was a revolutionary leader for the USSR, as he was the first to promote liberalization of the political landscape (Glasnost) and the economy (Perestroika); prior to this, the USSR had been strictly prohibiting liberal reform and maintained a command economy. The USSR, despite facing massive economic difficulties, was involved in a costly arms race with the United States under President Ronald Reagan. Regardless, the USSR began to crumble as liberal reforms proved difficult to handle and capitalist changes to the economy were badly instituted and caused major problems. The Cold War came to an end when the last war of Soviet occupation ended in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall came down in Germany, a series of mostly peaceful revolutions swept the Soviet Bloc states of eastern Europe in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed and formally dissolved itself from existence in 1991.
A referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence was held in Ukraine on 1 December 1991. An overwhelming majority of 92.3% of voters approved the declaration of independence made by the Verkhovna Rada on 24 August 1991.
Jack Foust Matlock Jr. is an American former ambassador, career Foreign Service Officer, a teacher, a historian, and a linguist. He was a specialist in Soviet affairs during some of the most tumultuous years of the Cold War, and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991.
Soviet Union–United States relations were fully established in 1933 as the succeeding bilateral ties to those between the Russian Empire and the United States, which lasted from 1776 until 1917; they were also the predecessor to the current bilateral ties between the Russian Federation and the United States that began in 1992. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was largely defined by mistrust and tense hostility. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany as well as the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan marked the Soviet and American entries into World War II on the side of the Allies in June and December 1941, respectively. As the Soviet–American alliance against the Axis came to an end following the Allied victory in 1945, the first signs of post-war mistrust and hostility began to immediately appear between the two countries. These bilateral tensions escalated into the Cold War, a decades-long period of tense hostile relations with short phases of détente that ended after the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the present-day Russian Federation in 1991.
Russia–Ukraine relations refer to the bilateral ties between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Following the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity in 2014, Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula was occupied by unmarked Russian forces, later being annexed by Russia, while pro-Russia separatists simultaneously engaged the Ukrainian military in an armed conflict for control over eastern Ukraine; these events marked the beginning of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. In a major escalation of the conflict on 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the Ukrainian mainland across a broad front. Ukraine severed all formal diplomatic ties with Russia on the day of the 2022 Russian invasion.
Belarus–Ukraine relations are foreign relations between Belarus and Ukraine. Both countries are full members of the Baku Initiative and Central European Initiative. In the waning days of 2021, the relationship between Ukraine and Russia began rapidly deteriorating, culminating in a full-scale invasion in late February 2022. Belarus has allowed the stationing of Russian troops and equipment in its territory, but has denied the presence of Belarusian troops in Ukraine.
This timeline of nuclear weapons development is a chronological catalog of the evolution of nuclear weapons rooting from the development of the science surrounding nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. In addition to the scientific advancements, this timeline also includes several political events relating to the development of nuclear weapons. The availability of intelligence on recent advancements in nuclear weapons of several major countries is limited because of the classification of technical knowledge of nuclear weapons development.
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, previously known as the Russian Soviet Republic and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic as well as being unofficially known as Soviet Russia, the Russian Federation or simply Russia, was an independent federal socialist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous of the Soviet socialist republics of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian Republic was composed of sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. The capital of the Russian SFSR was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Stalingrad, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev.
The following lists events that happened during 1991 in the Soviet Union and Russia.
The Lisbon Protocol to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was a document signed by representatives of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan that recognized the four states as successors of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and all of them assume obligations of the Soviet Union under the START I treaty. The protocol was signed in Lisbon, Portugal, on 23 May 1992.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union (1988–1991) was the process of internal political, economic, and ethnic disintegration within the Soviet Union, which resulted in the end of its existence as a sovereign state. It was an unintended result of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system, in an attempt to end the "Era of Stagnation". In late 1991, the leaders of three of the Union's founding and largest republics declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed, and eight more republics joined them shortly thereafter. Gorbachev had to resign his office as president and what was left of the parliament to formally acknowledge the Union's collapse as a fait accompli.
