The first president of independent Belarus, who had co-signed the dissolution of the USSR, has died.

The first president of independent Belarus and one of the undertakers of the USSR, Stanislav Suskevich, has passed away at the age of 87, his wife announced today.

“We hope there will be a state funeral, but no one has contacted us so far,” his widow, Irina Suskevich, told AFP.

According to media reports, Stanislav Suskevich passed away after being severely weakened by Covid-19, whose symptoms manifested themselves in March. His wife had stated in late April that her husband was intubated.

On December 8, 1991, the presidents of the Soviet republics of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Suskevich, and Leonid Kravtsuk, signed a treaty organizing the dissolution of the USSR, forcing President Mikheil , to resign and thus signing the death certificate of Soviet power.

“The USSR as a geopolitical reality and as a subject of international law has ceased to exist,” they said in a joint statement announcing the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Suskevich later recalled that the other two leaders had instructed him to brief Gorbachev, which he did with an awkward phone call to the Kremlin while Yeltsin was calling on US President George W. Bush.

Gorbachev, who had survived a hardline nuclear coup in August 1991 but was severely weakened, was forced to resign weeks later as the Soviet flag was raised for the last time in the Kremlin.

Suskevich ruled Belarus until 1994, when he was forced to resign after being accused along with other high-ranking officials of corruption in a report by the head of a parliamentary anti-corruption committee, Alexander Lukashenko.

A few months later, the latter will win the presidential election with opponents Suskevich and other candidates.

Nearly 30 years later, Lukashenko remains in power, at the head of an authoritarian regime that controls all levers.

Stanislav Suskevich, for his part, led until 2018 an opposition Social Democratic party. In 2012, following a protest rally, he stated that his Belarusian regime had barred him from leaving the country.

Suskevich remained a critic of Lukashenko and supported mass protests against the latter after the disputed 2020 elections, although he did not take part in the protests due to his health problems.

In an interview with Reuters in August of that year, he rightly predicted that Lukashenko would stay in power with the support of the Belarussian armed forces and Moscow.

“Lukashenko is serving the Kremlin because otherwise he could not stand. The Kremlin … supports him,” he told Reuters by telephone.

“In such circumstances, it is difficult for the exhausted and tortured Belarusian opposition to fight Russia.”

In 1997, Lukashenko signed a special decree freezing Suskevich’s pension and not updating it. In 2015, when the value of his pension had dropped to almost zero, he declined and increased it to the equivalent of $ 220 a month.

References to Stanislav Suskevich were removed from textbooks in 2021 after he had repeatedly spoken out against Lukashenko’s crackdown on protests.

The news of his death was broadcast today by the state news agency Belta, which quoted in just six paragraphs a simple chronology of his academic and political career.