Leonid Kravchuk

Born to Volhynian peasants in 1934, Kravchuk came up through the Communist Party as a propagandist, rising to chair the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR by 1990 as the union crumbled around him. He opposed the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow and led Ukraine to independence that December, then won the presidency in the country's first democratic election. In office he built a centralised state, formed a national military, and handed over the nuclear weapons - while the GDP contracted sharply and the old nomenklatura enriched itself in the chaos. Coal miners struck, he called snap elections in 1994, and lost to Leonid Kuchma. He stayed in parliament until 2006, drifted through shifting alliances - backing Yanukovych, then Tymoshenko - and returned in 2020 to negotiate over the Donbas war, where he controversially downplayed Russia's role. He died in May 2022, three months into the full invasion.