Viktor Yanukovych

Viktor Yanukovych was president of Ukraine from 2010 until protesters drove him out in February 2014, and his decision to turn away from Europe began the sequence that led to war. He grew up in Donetsk and had two convictions for robbery and assault as a young man, later expunged. He rose through the regional administration and became prime minister under Kuchma. His declared victory in the 2004 presidential election was annulled by the supreme court after mass protests over fraud, the Orange Revolution, and he lost the rerun to Viktor Yushchenko, whose face had been disfigured by dioxin poisoning during the campaign. He came back and won cleanly in 2010. In November 2013 his government abandoned an association agreement with the European Union at short notice under Russian pressure, and protests began in Kyiv that grew after riot police beat students. Around a hundred people were shot dead in central Kyiv in February 2014. Parliament voted to remove him and he fled to Russia. His residence at Mezhyhirya, opened to the public afterwards, contained a private zoo, a galleon restaurant and a collection of gold fittings that became the emblem of the whole period. Russia annexed Crimea within weeks and the war in Donbas began that spring. He was convicted of treason in absentia by a Ukrainian court in 2019. His Party of Regions drew its support overwhelmingly from the Russian-speaking east and south, and the collapse of his government removed the last major pro-Russian bloc from Ukrainian national politics.

• Lived: 1950 CE – ?
• Nationality: Ukrainian
• Roles: head_of_state, politician