Kravchuk << KRAHV chuk >>, Leonid Makarovich (1934-2022), was president of Ukraine from 1991 to 1994. Formerly a republic of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had declared its independence shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. As president, Kravchuk worked to keep Ukraine free from control by Russia, Ukraine’s large neighbor. He limited Ukraine’s role in the Commonwealth of Independent States, fearing Russian domination of that association of former Soviet republics. Kravchuk opposed efforts by Russia to regain the Crimean Peninsula, a region that had been transferred from Russia to Ukraine by the Soviet government in 1954. Kravchuk ran for reelection in 1994, but he was defeated. 
Kravchuk was born on Jan. 10, 1934, in the village of Velykyi Zhytyn, in an area of western Ukraine that was part of Poland at that time. He graduated with a degree in economics from the Taras Shevchenko State University of Kiev (now the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) in 1958 and became a political economy teacher. He joined the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1960 and eventually became a leading party official. He quit the party in 1991 as the Soviet Communist system was falling apart.
After Kravchuk lost the 1994 presidential election, he ran successfully for a seat in the Ukrainian parliament. He served in the parliament from 1994 to 2006. In 2020, the Ukrainian government asked him to head a negotiating team for talks on resolving the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Kravchuk died on May 10, 2022.
