Leonid Kravchuk

Biography

Leonid Kravchuk was born in 1934 in Volhynia, then part of Poland. He graduated from Kyiv State University in 1958, joined the Communist Party the same year and spent decades in its propaganda apparatus, becoming head of the Ukrainian party's agitation and propaganda department in 1980 and its second secretary in 1990.

In July 1990 he became chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. Over 1990 and 1991 he moved from orthodox communism towards national positions; he neither backed nor condemned the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow while it lasted, but supported independence once it failed. In December 1991 he was elected Ukraine's first president, and days later signed the Belovezha Accords that ended the Soviet Union.

As president he built up state institutions and an independent army, and in 1994 agreed to give up the nuclear arsenal Ukraine had inherited, in return for recognition of its sovereignty. His government faced a deep economic crisis and miners' strikes, and he lost the 1994 election to Leonid Kuchma, handing over power peacefully.

He sat in parliament from 1994 to 2006, from 1998 for the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united), and led the unsuccessful Ne Tak bloc in 2006. In 2020 he represented Ukraine in the Trilateral Contact Group on the war in Donbas. He died in 2022.