Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk, who agreed to give up his country’s Soviet nuclear arsenal, the third-largest in the world, has died at the age of 88.
“Sad news and a great loss,” presidential aide Andriy Yermak said on Telegram, describing Kravchuk as “a wise patriot of Ukraine, a truly historical figure in gaining our independence”.
Kravchuk led Ukraine as its Communist party boss in the waning years of the Soviet Union, and played a pivotal role in the demise of the USSR before holding the Ukrainian presidency from 1991 through 1994.
He was a driving force in Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and later that year joined leaders of Russia and Belarus to sign an agreement on 8 December 1991, which formally declared that the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
As president, Kravchuk agreed to transfer remaining Soviet nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory to Russian control, in a deal backed by the US.
He lost the 1994 presidential election to former prime minister Leonid Kuchma. In 2020 he returned to politics to try to negotiate a settlement as part of a “contact group” for the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists had fought Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Kravchuk had been in poor health and underwent a heart operation last year.
Ukrainian Defence minister Oleksii Reznikov wrote on Twitter that with Kravchuk’s signature to the 1991 agreement disbanding the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire disintegrated”.
“Thank you for the peaceful renewal of our Independence. We’re defending it now with weapons in our hands,” Reznikov wrote Tuesday.
In a post on Telegram, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko paid tribute to Kravchuk, who served as president from 1991 to 1994, hailing him for his “talent, a strong character and knowledge”.
Kravchuk’s death comes a week after that of the first president of post-Soviet Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, who died aged 87 after treatment for Covid-19, according to his wife.
After Shushkevich’s death, Kravchuk was the last survivor of the three leaders who signed the 1991 deal. Russian president Boris Yeltsin died in 2007 aged 76.
Since annexing Crimea from Ukraine and throwing its weight behind the 2014 separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has sought to cast doubt on Ukraine’s statehood and falsely portray the country as an artificial construct of Communist rule – rhetoric that paved the way for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In a televised address on 21 February , three days before the invasion, Putin blamed “historic, strategic mistakes” by Communist leaders for having led to the collapse of the Soviet state. Ukraine “turned to us for financial support many times from the very moment they declared independence”, Putin said in an apparent reference to Kravchuk’s time in office.
Some participants in the historic 8 December meeting at a hunting lodge in the Belovezha forest, in what is now Belarus, pointed to Kravchuk as having played the main role in the demise of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine had declared its sovereignty after an August coup by hardline Communist party members weakened Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev’s authority. 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 Belovezha talks said Kravchuk rejected any efforts to keep the Soviet Union going with reforms.
“Kravchuk was focused on Ukraine’s independence,” Belarusian leader Shushkevich, who took part in the talks and signed the deal, told The Associated Press in an interview last year. “He was proud that Ukraine declared its independence in a referendum and he was elected president on 1 December, 1991.”
