The probate hearing is scheduled for August 10, 2026. Legal experts predict the case will likely reach the Delaware Supreme Court, and possibly the U.S. Supreme Court, on the question of whether a non-existent state can be a party to a probate dispute.
“This is not about politics,” Judge Rehnquist stated from the bench. “It is about determining what set of laws—Delaware’s, the defunct USSR’s, or modern Belarus’s—governs the distribution of a deceased person’s property. We are in uncharted waters.”
The decedent, identified as , a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Minsk in 1992, passed away last month at her home in Greenville, Delaware. Her Last Will and Testament, signed in 2021, has triggered a complex, multi-jurisdictional process that legal scholars say will test the limits of international estate law.
Judge Marcus C. Rehnquist, presiding over the Chancery Court’s probate docket, has ordered a "dual-tracking" approach. A forensic genealogist will attempt to establish Mrs. Volkov-Morrison’s legal nationality at the time of the USSR’s dissolution, while a separate master will review the validity of the 2021 Will under Delaware’s Uniform Probate Code.
However, a competing claim has been filed by the , acting through a private law firm in Washington, D.C. Belarusian authorities argue that under Soviet inheritance law, which they claim as a predecessor state to the BSSR, a portion of any citizen’s estate must revert to the state if heirs are not "direct bloodline dependents."
The case has drawn intense interest from the estimated 750,000 former Soviet citizens living in the United States who naturalized after 1991. Many have outdated wills that refer to their "Soviet" birth.
