MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

First independent Ukraine President Kravchuk dies aged 88

Kravchuk, nicknamed the “cunning fox,” was some sort of a compromise figure for communists and nationalists alike

Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine's first president in the post Societ era, died Tuesday in Kyiv, it was reported by local media. He was 88 years old.

 Kravchuk was born Jan. 10, 1934, in the town of Veliki Zhitin, in the then Polish voivodeship of Volhynia (today the Ukrainian province of Rivne). In 1990 he headed the Supreme Council of Ukraine, which under his presidency, approved the Declaration of Independence Aug. 24, 1991. He became the first president after winning the Dec. 1 elections with 61.6% of the votes.

Seven days later, on December 8, 1991, Leonid Kravchuk and his counterparts in Russia, Boris Yeltsin, and Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, signed an agreement to found the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), marking the end of the USSR.

In 1994, after a presidential term of only 32 months - the shortest among Ukrainian presidents - Kravchuk lost an early election forced by a miners' strike, his waning popularity following his controversial decision to give up the country’s nuclear arsenal and transfer it to Russia, in addition to a sizeable economic crisis marked by hyperinflation and business closures. When the war with Russian-backed separatists broke out in 2014, Kravchuk’s decision to give up nuclear weapons was recalled by many as a mistake.

For the next 20 years, Kravchuk held a seat in the Verkhovna Rada (national parliament), until the 2006 elections when his Social Democratic Party failed to gain the necessary support to enter the legislature.

President Volodymyr Zelensky praised Kravchuk for his role in steering the nation out of Soviet rule. “He was a person who could always find wise words and say them in such a way that all Ukrainians would listen,” Zelensky said.

In 2020, 86-year-old Kravchuk made a brief political comeback, accepting an offer from President Zelensky to become a top Ukrainian negotiator in talks with Moscow over settling the separatist conflict in the east of the country