Leonid Kravchuk. Archival photo MOSCOW, May 10. The first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, who died on May 10, was «a very difficult person,» Vladimir Shevchenko, ex-chief of protocol for the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, expressed this opinion in a commentary to RIA Novosti. Kravchuk died on Tuesday at the age of 88 as a result of a long illness, a week after the death of his peer Stanislav Shushkevich, the first leader of post-Soviet Belarus. Kravchuk was elected President of Ukraine on December 1, 1991, in the 1994 elections he lost to Leonid Kuchma. From July 2020 to February 2022, Kravchuk headed the contact group for the settlement in Donbass. He owns the statement that the Ukrainian people were the gravedigger of the USSR. to the post he held (from a teacher of political economy at the Chernivtsi Financial College to Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR — ed.), and then turned over,» Shevchenko said. He noted that he had known Kravchuk since Soviet times, but was not present during the signing of the Belovezhskaya Accords, when he, along with Yeltsin and Shushkevich, signed agreements on the termination of the existence of the Soviet Union. «I knew him (Kravchuk — ed.) both in Soviet times and later … I simply did not see him at work when they were in Belovezhskaya Pushcha,» Shevchenko said, explaining that at that time he was in charge of the protocol service of the first president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev.
