Leonid Danylovych Kuchma (9 August 1938-) was Prime Minister of Ukraine from 13 October 1992 to 22 September 1993 (succeeding Valentyn Symonenko and preceding Yukhym Zvyahilsky) and President of Ukraine from 19 July 1994 to 23 January 2005 (succeeding Leonid Kravchuk and preceding Viktor Yushchenko).
Biography[]
Leonid Danylovych Kuchma was born in Chaikyne, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union on 9 August 1938, the son of a Red Army soldier who was killed during World War II. He worked as an aerospace engineer at the Baikonur cosmodrome before becoming the CPSU party chief at the Yuzhny Machine-building Plant and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine at the age of 38. However, by the end of the 1980s, he openly criticized the party, and he served as a member of the Verkhovna Rada from 1990 to 1992. In 1992, he became Prime Minister of Ukraine under President Leonid Kravchuk, serving as an independent. He resigned due to the slow pace of reform, but he was elected President in 1994, seeking to restore economic relations with Russia and enact faster pro-market reforms. He received strong support from industrial areas in the east and south of the country, and he was re-elected in 1999, with the areas of opposition in the last election supporting him, and his areas of support joining the opposition. He reduced subsidies, lifted price controls, lowered taxes, privatized industry and agriculture, and reformed currency regulation and banking. He left office in 2005, and he took part in the 2018 Donbass War peace negotiations.