What CIS is and how it works

Three weeks in December

Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the founding agreement in Belovezhskaya Pushcha on 8 December 1991. Those were the three republics whose signatures had made the union in 1922, and the agreement they signed recorded that it had ceased to exist. Eight more republics signed a protocol at Alma-Ata thirteen days later, which put every signatory in as a founder on the same footing. Georgia acceded in December 1993.

The declaration issued at Alma-Ata that day did two things at once. It guaranteed the borders the republics already had, and it denied the new body any standing above them: the Commonwealth is neither a state nor a supra-state entity, and it acts through what its members agree to sign.

The charter two founders did not sign

The charter was adopted at a summit in Minsk on 22 January 1993 and registered with the United Nations Secretariat on 24 May 1996. Ukraine and Turkmenistan did not sign it, and the Executive Committee's own account of the Commonwealth is plain about the consequence: both are founding and participating states, and neither is de jure a member state. Turkmenistan settled its position on 26 August 2005 by declaring that it would take part as an associate member, which is the standing its permanent neutrality allows.

A roster of the Commonwealth therefore depends on the document being counted from. The signatories of December 1991 are one list, the parties to the charter are a shorter one, and the governments that send a delegation to a given council are a third. This page files the countries whose own records carry the membership. Where the lists disagree the catalogue records the disagreement and settles none of it.

No territory, no tariff

The Commonwealth holds nothing in common the way a union does: no shared territory, no external tariff, no institution whose decisions bind a government that voted against them. Its work sits in separate treaties, each ratified one state at a time, so a member can be party to one agreement and outside the next without leaving anything at all. The register of Commonwealth instruments is kept that way as well, with the signatures and the ratifications listed under each act rather than once for the body as a whole.

The Executive Committee works from 17 Kirova Street in Minsk and keeps a second office on Sofiyskaya Embankment in Moscow. The Interparliamentary Assembly is older than the charter it now sits beside: the chairs of seven parliaments signed the agreement that created it at Alma-Ata on 27 March 1992, its delegates chose Saint Petersburg at the first plenary session that September, and it met in the Tauride Palace on 28 and 29 December 1992. A convention signed at Minsk on 26 May 1995 made it an interstate body in its own right, and the model laws it adopts take effect only where a national parliament enacts them.

Leaving takes twelve months

The charter asks for twelve months' written notice, and every departure so far has run the full term. Georgia gave notice on 18 August 2008 and its membership ended on 18 August 2009. Ukraine, never a party to the charter, stopped taking part in the statutory bodies from May 2018 and has denounced agreements one at a time since. The Parliament of Moldova voted on 2 April 2026 to denounce all three founding instruments together, the agreement of 8 December 1991, the Alma-Ata Protocol and the charter, and its membership ends on 8 April 2027.

What the member records carry

The countries filed here sit across two continents and three subregions: Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Every one of them dates its present statehood to 1991 except Russia, whose record reaches back to 1263 and lists 25 December 1991 among its foundings rather than as the whole of one.

Two of the seats at the United Nations are older than the independence that goes with them. Belarus and Russia carry an admission date of 24 October 1945 on the United Nations list of member states, the day the Charter of the United Nations came into force. The other eight were admitted together on 2 March 1992, ten weeks after the protocol at Alma-Ata.

Russian is an official language on the records of Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the charter makes it the working language of the Commonwealth. Kazakhstan and Russia still answer to the same international dialling code, +7, which the Soviet numbering plan gave them and neither has given up.