Sentence:  What at the time of the initial agreement of Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Kravchuk to join together in a new 'Commonwealth of Independent States' had seemed like a reconstitution of the lands of ancient Rus, quickly turned out to be, in the words of the leading Russian-Ukrainian reformer Aleksandr Tsipko, merely a <WSD>'velvet</WSD> disintegration'. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  peaceful, carried out without violence; especially as pertaining to the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia.