The former chairman of the Supreme Council and the first leader of independent Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, has died, his wife Irina has said.
"He passed away on 3 May at 23.35, the pressure rose," she has revealed. She explained that he died of complications from coronavirus.
Shushkevich's widow, whom he married in 1976, added that the date and place of his funeral had not yet been decided.
“We are now dealing with these questions,” she said.
The politician was 87 years old.
Shushkevich was born on 15 December, 1934, in Minsk. On 8 December, 1991, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha (Belarus), Shushkevich, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk signed an agreement on the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which is when the termination of the existence of the USSR began.