Leonid Kravchuk
Leonid Kravchuk was the Communist Party's ideology chief in Kyiv who became the first president of independent Ukraine, signed the agreement in a Belarusian hunting lodge that ended the Soviet Union, gave up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world for a piece of paper, and lost the election of 1994 to his own prime minister over an economy that had lost half its output. He was born in 1934 in a village in Volhynia that was then Poland, the son of peasants, and rose through the party as a lecturer and a propagandist to be secretary for ideology in 1989 and, in July 1990, chairman of the Ukrainian parliament, where he handled the new democratic opposition with a flexibility they came to call his slyness. During the coup of August 1991 he waited two days, and when it failed he led the parliament that declared independence on the 24th by three hundred and forty-six votes to one. On 1 December ninety per cent of Ukrainians confirmed it and sixty-two per cent elected him, and a week later at Belavezha with Yeltsin and Shushkevich he signed the paper that dissolved the Union and made the Commonwealth, since without Ukraine there was nothing to keep. The three years that followed were the building of a state from a republic's ministries. There was an army sworn to Ukraine, a currency coupon that lost its value at ten thousand per cent a year, the Black Sea Fleet argued over with Russia, and the question of the warheads. He settled that at Budapest in December 1994 by handing them to Russia in return for American money and a memorandum in which Russia, Britain and the United States promised to respect the borders. He had already lost by then. The miners' strikes of 1993 forced an early election, and in July 1994 Leonid Kuchma, the rocket factory director he had made prime minister, beat him on a promise of closer ties with Russia. He stayed in parliament for twelve more years, shifting parties, and in 2020 was still negotiating with Russia for a president born the year he took office. He died in May 2022, three months into the invasion he had spent thirty years saying was impossible.
- Lived: 1934 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Ukrainian
- Roles: president, politician
