It was rapidly superseded by the de facto Russian control of those nuclear weapons,[1] and the formation of separate national armies for each of the former Soviet states, and had effectively ceased to exist by the end of 1993.

On 16 March 1992 a decree by Boris Yeltsin created the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation under the operational control of Allied High Command and the Ministry of Defence, which was headed by the President.

After this announcement, Marshal of Aviation Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, Commander-in-Chief of CIS Armed Forces, Head of the Main Command (Glavkomat) "and a skeletal staff to support his role as commander of the CIS Armed Forces were evicted from the MoD and General Staff buildings and given offices in the former Warsaw Pact headquarters on the northern outskirts of Moscow" (on Prospekt Mira).

[5] Shaposhnikov's staff quickly became a very weak body as the new states' authorities asserted their control over their own armed forces.

[6] An agreement was formally signed at Ashgabat on 24 December 1993 to establish the Staff for the Coordination of Military Cooperation Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States (Russian: Штабе по координации военного сотрудничества государств – участников Содружества Независимых Государств).