Last week, Stanislav Shushkevich, the first president of Belarus after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, died at the age of 87 from a corona infection. Shushkevich came to power after signing the Bialowieza Agreement in 1991 with the then Russian leader Boris Yeltsin and the future head of state of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, which dissolved the Soviet Union.