Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first independent president, dies

Kyiv, Ukraine (AFP) – Leonid Kravchuk, who led Ukraine to independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as its first president, died on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said. He was 88 years old.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised Kravchuk, calling him not just a historical figure but “a man who knew how to find and say wise words so that all Ukrainians could hear them.”

Zelensky said Kravchuk died on Tuesday, but did not give details of the circumstances. He was in poor health and underwent heart surgery last year.

Kravchuk led Ukraine as head of the Communist Party in the last years of the Soviet Union, and played a pivotal role in the demise of the Soviet Union before assuming the Ukrainian presidency from 1991 until 1994.

He was a driving force in Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and later that year joined with the leaders of Russia and Belarus to sign an agreement on December 8, 1991.which officially declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed.

As president, Kravchuk agreed to transfer Soviet nuclear weapons remaining on Ukrainian soil to Russian control, in a deal backed by the United States.

He lost the 1994 presidential election to former Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma. In 2020, he returned to politics in an attempt to negotiate a settlement as part of a “contact group” for the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since 2014.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov wrote on Twitter that with Kravchuk’s signing of the December 1991 agreement to dissolve the Soviet Union, “the evil empire disintegrated.”

Thank you for the peaceful renewal of our independence. “We are now defending it with guns in our hands,” Reznikov wrote on Tuesday.

Kravchuk’s death comes a week after Stanislav Shushkevich, the first president of the post-Soviet country, died at the age of 87. After treatment for COVID-19, according to his wife.

Since Shushkevich’s death, Kravchuk was the last surviving of the three leaders who signed the 1991 agreement. Russian President Boris Yeltsin died in 2007 at the age of 76.

Since Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and threw its weight behind the 2014 separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to discredit the Ukrainian state and wrongly portray the state as an artificial construct of communist rule—the rhetoric that paved the way for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine..

In a televised address on February 21, three days before the invasion, Putin blamed “strategic and historical mistakes” by communist leaders for leading to the collapse of the Soviet state. “Ukraine has turned to us for financial support several times since the moment they declared independence,” Putin said, in an apparent reference to Kravchuk’s time in office.

Some participants of the historic meeting on December 8 in a hunting lodge in the Beloviza Forest, in what is now Belarus, noted that Kravchuk played the main role in the demise of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine declared its sovereignty after the August coup by members of the hard-line Communist Party that weakened the authority of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. A week before the Belovezha Agreement, Kravchuk was elected president of Ukraine in a vote that also overwhelmingly approved its independence from Moscow.

Participants in the Beloviza talks said Kravchuk rejected any efforts to keep the Soviet Union pursuing reforms.

“Kravchuk was focused on Ukraine’s independence,” Belarusian leader Shushkevich, who was involved in the talks and signed the agreement, told The Associated Press in an interview last year. “He was proud that Ukraine declared its independence in a referendum and was elected president on December 1, 1991.”

Zelensky said Kravchuk’s ability to speak to Ukrainians was especially important in “difficult moments of crisis, when the future of the whole country depends on the courage of one man.”

Zelensky’s communication skills and the decision to remain in Kyiv when it came under Russian attack helped make him a powerful wartime leader.

Noting that Kravchuk lived during World War II and the occupation, Zelensky said he knows the price of freedom and with all his heart wants peace for Ukraine. I’m sure we’ll make it happen. We will achieve our victory and our peace.”