‘I wondered if they’d shoot down our plane’ The senior diplomat who midwifed post-Soviet Russia looks back at the Belovezha Accords, the KGB’s survival, and Putin’s NATO fallacy
Andrey Kozyrev served as Moscow’s foreign affairs minister in the early 1990s, first for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and then during Boris Yeltsin’s first presidential term in the Russian Federation. Kozyrev witnessed the August Coup firsthand and participated directly in drafting the Belovezha Accords, which legally dissolved the USSR. After leaving his cabinet role, Kozyrev was elected to Russia’s State Duma as an openly pro-Western politician. He later pursued various business ventures and authored several books. In recent years, Kozyrev has lived in the United States, where he’s been an outspoken critic of Kremlin policy. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he’s called on Russian diplomats to resign in protest against the war. Writer and journalist Mikhail Zygar recently sat down with Kozyrev and asked him about his storied past. Meduza summarizes Kozyrev’s key revelations and observations.
Mikhail Zygar
How the Belovezha Accords came together
Negotiators assembled without a prepared draft of the agreement. Instead, various options were on the table, ranging from a model similar to Great Britain’s Commonwealth of Nations to a confederation with a central government similar to Switzerland. All the options were considered feasible.
In the end, the Commonwealth of Independent States was born overnight, in a matter of hours. Kozyrev threw together the agreement’s text, working with RSFSR Economy Minister Yegor Gaidar, Belarusian Foreign Affairs Minister Pyotr Kravchenko, and RSFSR Supreme Soviet member Sergey Shakhrai.
Ukrainian delegates did not directly participate in drafting the text; they wandered around the cottage where Kozyrev and his colleagues worked, occasionally popping in to ask for a progress report.
In the morning, Kozyrev and the others shared their draft with the delegation’s representatives. They read it immediately and made only minor changes, except for the title, which originally read, “The Declaration on the Creation of a Commonwealth of States.” The delegates added the word “Independent.”
The notion that the USSR would cease to exist was developed during the discussions before drafting the agreement.
Kozyrev told Zygar that the mood among the Russian delegation was “mixed” after leaving Belarus: “On one hand, it seemed like we knew we had done the right thing; on the other hand, this right thing was difficult for us because, after all, the Soviet Union, no matter what it was, had been our homeland.”
Kozyrev said he even wondered if their plane might be shot out of the sky before it could land, given that he and his colleagues had technically just committed treason by negotiating the nation’s dissolution.
Why Yeltsin didn’t dissolve the KGB
On August 22, 1991, demonstrators assembled outside the KGB headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square. According to Alexander Podrabinek, a dissident in the crowd that day, protesters wanted to seize the building, but Yeltsin arrived and convinced people to disperse.
Kozyrev told Zygar that he asked Yeltsin why he intervened to protect the KGB. Yeltsin said it was the only functioning agency that could still maintain security in Russia, but he admitted that it was full of “criminals and so on.” Kozyrev said he didn’t argue but pointed out that Yeltsin was a criminal to the KGB because he destroyed the Soviet Union:
He smiled and laughed, but yes, I believe it was a fundamental mistake. It was the first nail driven into the coffin of [Russia’s] future democracy. The people should have been allowed to act. The supporters of democracy had gathered there, people I personally know well, and he knew them well, too. They wouldn’t have lynched anyone. There wouldn’t have been any extrajudicial killings or anything like that. But they would have seized it, and that would have been the end. They’d have opened all those archives. […] They could have driven a stake through Dracula’s heart, but it survived — both symbolically and practically.
Putin’s NATO membership ploy
Kozyrev argued that Russia was “absolutely unprepared” for NATO membership in the 1990s despite the Kremlin’s claimed interest in joining the alliance. Moscow faced the enormous task of restructuring its armed forces and placing the entire military under democratic control.
By framing the situation as NATO’s refusal to welcome Russia into its ranks, Putin “distorted the issue and turned it into a political bargaining chip to avoid doing anything,” said Kozyrev, arguing that Putin was simply bluffing when he said in 2000 that he favored Russian membership in NATO. “He knew perfectly well that they were empty words,” and when NATO responded that membership is a process that takes a long time, Russia’s new president had what sounded like a rejection and the grounds to use NATO as a “bogeyman,” Kozyrev told Zygar.
The former statesman insisted that Moscow never had rational grounds to expect an attack from NATO:
NATO has never intended to attack Russia, and it’s completely absurd even to think that NATO would want to cross Russia’s borders now, tomorrow, or ever. Never. I can’t even imagine what could provoke them to do it. They might defend London if attacked, but they wouldn’t go into Russia. I promise you that.