First Head of State of Belarus Stanislav Shushkevich dies age 87

First Head of State of Belarus Stanislav Shushkevich dies age 87.

On Wednesday, 4, May, Stanislav Shushkevish, the First Head of State of Belarus was announced dead, following his Wife Irina informing EuroRadio, a Belarus radio station.

Shushkevich signed the historic Belovezhshkaya Push agreements in December 1991 alongside Boris Yeltsin, Former President of Russia, and Leonid Kravchuk, Former President of Ukraine, which formerly marked the end of the Soviet Union.

Stanislav Shushkevich was born to a top radio electronic Scientist and a Belarusian writer who had been repressed during the Stalinist years. In 1989 he was elected People’s Deputy of USSR becoming President of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus two years later.

He was dismissed in 1994 by a group of young deputies, amongst them Alexander Lukashenko, the current president of Belarus who was elected six months after the dismissal of Shushkevich. 

Shushkevich was re-elected as a member of parliament in 1996, and  criticised Lukashenko till the end, even asking the Constitutional Court to dismiss Lukashenko. He chaired the Belarusian Social Democratic Party for 10 years after being appointed in 1998, and fell ill with Covid-19 earlier this year, but it has not yet been reported if that was the cause of his death.

The news comes at the same time as Russian Journalist Alexander Nevzorov  being declared a Foreign Agent by the Russian Interior Ministry, following an article he published on Mariupol. On 22 March, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Nevzorov for spreading fakes about the Russian Armed Forces.

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