The man who hosted the meeting that ended the Soviet Union is proud to say he was first to sign the declaration, known as the Belavezha Accords, followed by Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine’s Leonid Kravchuk.
“I did not think about it when I was signing, but when I studied the ‘Yugoslavia variant,’ I am pretty convinced that we prevented civil war on the territory of the Soviet Union,” says Stanislav Shushkevich to VOA in his home office.
Surrounded by books and photos of former world leaders, Shushkevich flips through photo albums from the time, recalling why he convened the meeting 25 …read more
Source: Voice of America
