Viktor Yushchenko

Biography

Viktor Yushchenko was born in 1954 in Khoruzhivka, in the Sumy region of Soviet Ukraine, to two village schoolteachers; his father had survived German prisoner-of-war camps, including Auschwitz. He graduated from the Ternopil Finance and Economics Institute in 1975, did his military service on the Soviet-Turkish border and then made a career in banking, rising to senior posts in the Ukrainian office of the Soviet State Bank and at the Agroindustrial Bank Ukraina.

In 1993 he became governor of the National Bank of Ukraine. He oversaw the introduction of the hryvnia, brought hyperinflation under control and set up modern supervision of commercial banks. President Leonid Kuchma made him prime minister in December 1999; the economy recovered under his government, but its clashes with coal and gas interests led parliament to remove him in a no-confidence vote in April 2001.

Moving into opposition, he led the Our Ukraine bloc to first place in the 2002 parliamentary election and in 2004 ran for president against Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. During the campaign he was poisoned with dioxin, which left his face disfigured. The rigged runoff set off the Orange Revolution, and he won the repeat vote ordered by the Supreme Court.

As president from January 2005 he sought closer ties with the European Union and NATO, but his alliance with Yulia Tymoshenko broke down and his term was dominated by coalition crises, including his contested dissolution of parliament in 2007. He came fifth in the 2010 election with about 5 percent of the vote. Shortly before leaving office he named Stepan Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, an award later annulled, and in 2012 the Our Ukraine list he headed failed to enter parliament.