(Kyiv) Kravchuk, who led Ukraine to independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as its first president, has died, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday. He was 88 years old.
Posted at 3:43 p.m.
Andriy Yermak, head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, confirmed Kravchuk’s death on the Telegram app without giving details of the circumstances. Mr. Kravchuk was in poor health and had undergone heart surgery last year.
Mr Kravchuk led Ukraine as leader of the Communist Party in the final years of the Soviet Union and played a central role in the demise of the USSR before serving as the Ukrainian presidency from 1991 to 1994.
He was a driving force behind Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and later that year joined the leaders of Russia and Belarus in signing an agreement on December 8, 1991, which officially declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
President Kravchuk has agreed to transfer remaining Soviet nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory to Russia under a US-backed deal.
He lost the 1994 presidential election to former prime minister Leonid Kuchma. In 2020, he returned to politics to try to broker a settlement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists had been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov wrote on Twitter that with Mr Kravchuk signing the December 1991 agreement dissolving the Soviet Union, “the evil empire has disintegrated”.
“Thank you for the peaceful renewal of our independence. We are now defending it with weapons in our hands,” Reznikov wrote on Tuesday.