Leonid Kravchuk

Leonid Kravchuk is the first President of Ukraine.

Brief biography

Leonid Kravchuk was born in 1939 in the Rivne region of Ukraine. Died on May 10, 2022.

He graduated from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

From 1990 to 1991 he was a member of the Politburo of the CPU Central Committee and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR.

In 1991, after the August putsch, he left the CPSU.

It was under the chairmanship of Leonid Kravchuk in the Supreme Soviet that the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine was adopted and voted.

He was elected the first president of independent Ukraine in the first round, with an overwhelming margin of votes, in December 1991, and a week after his election signed the famous Belovezhskaya Agreement.

Already in 1994, he lost the early presidential election to Leonid Kuchma and became a people's deputy of the Verkhovna Rada (Social and Market Choice faction).

In 2006, he headed the opposition political alliance "NOT TAKE!", whose top five members, in addition to Kravchuk, included Yuriy Boyko, Nestor Shufrych, Viktor Medvedchuk and Valentina Dovzhenko.

During the Revolution of Dignity, Leonid Kravchuk called on President Viktor Yanukovych to convene a "round table of presidents" to resolve the conflict situation. Yanukovych listened to his opinion, but the meeting of this negotiating group did not lead to any significant results.

He is the author of over five hundred articles and nine books, the most famous of which is "One Ukraine, One People"

Appointment as head of the TCG on Donbass

At the end of July 2020, Kravchuk agreed to head the Ukrainian delegation to the TCG on Donbass. Before that, Leonid Kuchma was the chairman.

Fame

In addition to the fame of the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk was also quite famous for his winged expression "We have what we have".

He also made history thanks to the slang name of hand trucks - "Kravchuchka", which were extremely popular in Ukraine in the 90s.

Leonid Kravchuk remained a public and media personality for many years, appearing in various TV programs, on the radio, giving interviews to many publications.

He actively opposed Russian aggression. He condemned the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbass. In his statements, he regularly lambasted Russia and criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kravchuk was confident that Russia would eventually return the occupied territories of the ODRLO to Ukraine. He declared that the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine should be broken as soon as possible and definitively.

He was also convinced of the failure of the trilateral format of the Minsk talks and called on Ukraine to return to the use of the Budapest Memorandum, with the involvement of 12 states in the negotiation process.

Death

Kravchuk's death became known on May 10, 2022. The politician was 88 years old.

Health problems began at Kravchuk in the summer of 2021. Then he underwent surgery, after which he was connected to an artificial lung ventilation machine.

Since then, the first president continued a long rehabilitation after a very complicated operation.