Stanislav Shushkevich, the first leader of Belarus since the time republic gained independence, died at the age of 87. Shushkevich was one of those who signed the Belovezha Treaty, which marked the end of the existence of the Soviet union.
In late April, it was reported that Shushkevich was hospitalised. A month earlier, he contracted the omicron strain of the coronavirus even though his social contacts had been minimized.
Presidents of the RSFSR, Ukraine and Belarus — Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich — are the destroyers of the Soviet Union, Russian Senator Sergei Tsekov told lenta.ru.
"They played an extremely unfavorable role. Instead of preserving the country, its organisation and transformation, they just destroyed everything that our ancestors had been creating for centuries. The people turned out to be extremely stupid, extremely ambitious. They thought more about their position, about their position in the state, but they did not think about the interests of the countries and the peoples,” said Tsekov.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Stanislav Shushkevich became a people's deputy of the USSR and a deputy of the Supreme Council of the BSSR (Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic). In 1990, he was elected First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus. After the August coup in 1991, he took the post of Chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus.