Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych is a Ukrainian former politician who served as the fourth president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He also served as the prime minister of Ukraine several times between 2002 and 2007 and was a member of the Verkhovna Rada from 2006 to 2010. Yanukovych was [|removed from the presidency] during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, which followed months of protests against him. Since then, he has lived in exile in Russia.
Yanukovych was a member of the pro-Russian Party of Regions. Before entering national politics, Yanukovych was the governor of his native Donetsk Oblast from 1997 to 2002. He was simultaneously the chairman of the oblast's legislature from 1999 to 2001. He first ran for president in the 2004 election, where he was declared the winner against Viktor Yushchenko. However, allegations of electoral fraud and voter intimidation caused widespread protests, in what became known as the Orange Revolution. The Ukrainian Supreme Court nullified the election and ordered a rerun, which Yanukovych lost to Yushchenko. Yanukovych ran for president again in 2010, this time beating Yulia Tymoshenko in an election deemed free and fair by international observers.
Yanukovych stood for economic modernisation, greater economic ties with the EU, and military non-alignment. However, his years in power saw what analysts described as democratic backsliding, which included the jailing of Tymoshenko, a decline in press freedom and an increase in cronyism and corruption. In November 2013, Yanukovych suddenly withdrew from signing an association agreement with the EU, amidst economic pressure from Russia. Ukraine's parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalizing the agreement. This sparked massive protests against him, known as the Euromaidan. The unrest peaked in February 2014, when almost 100 protesters were killed by government forces. An agreement was signed by Yanukovych and the opposition on 21 February 2014, but he secretly fled the capital that evening. The next day, Ukraine's parliament voted to [|remove him] and schedule early elections on the grounds that he had withdrawn from his constitutional duties. Some of his own party voted for his removal.
Ukraine's new government issued an arrest warrant for Yanukovych, accusing him of responsibility for the killing of protesters. He fled to Russia, claiming to still be the head of state. In 2019, he was sentenced in absentia to a thirteen-year prison term for high treason by a Ukrainian court. In polling conducted since he left office, Yanukovych has ranked as one of the worst presidents in Ukrainian history. Yanukovych has also given his name to a collective term for blunders made by Ukrainian politicians: Yanukisms.
Early life and career
Viktor Yanukovych was born in the village of Zhukovka near Yenakiieve in Donetsk Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. Of his childhood he has written: "My childhood was difficult and hungry. I grew up without my mother, who died when I was two. I went around bare-footed on the streets. I had to fight for myself every day.Yanukovych is of Russian, Polish and Belarusian descent. Yanukovych is a surname of Belarusian origin, Yanuk being a derivative of the Catholic name Yan. His mother was a Russian nurse and his father, Fyodor Yanukovych, was a Polish-Belarusian locomotive-driver, originally from in the Dokshytsy Raion of the Vitebsk Region which is in present-day Belarus. On various occasions, Yanukovych's family has been dogged by accusations that Fyodor Yanukovych was a member of the Schutzmannschaft during World War II, in particular claims by members of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, which included documents from the NKVD supposedly revealing his involvement with the Schutzmannschaft. However, it has also been stated by residents of Yanuki that Yanukovych's family left for the Donbas before 1917, and that the collaborator Fyodor Yanukovych was an unrelated individual. Others, particularly members of the Party of Regions, have claimed that the documents were a falsehood with the intention of disparaging Yanukovych ahead of elections.
By the time he was a teenager, Yanukovych's father had remarried. However, Viktor left home due to conflicts with his stepmother, and was brought up by his Polish paternal grandmother, originally from Warsaw. His grandfather and great-grandparents were Lithuanian-Poles. Yanukovych has half-sisters from his father's remarriage, but has no contact with them.
In 1971, Yanukovych married Lyudmyla Nastenko a niece of Yenakiyeve city judge Oleksandr Sazhyn.
In July 1974, Yanukovych enrolled at the Donetsk Polytechnic Institute. In 1976, as a second-year student, he was promoted to director of a trucking division within the Ordzhonikidzeugol coal-mining company. His appointment as the chief manager marked the start of his managerial career as a regional transport executive. He held various positions in transport companies in Yenakiieve and Donetsk until 1996.
Criminal convictions
On 15 December 1967, at the age of 17, Yanukovych was sentenced to three years imprisonment for participating in a robbery and assault. On 8 June 1970 he was convicted for a second time on charges of assault. He was sentenced to two years of imprisonment and did not appeal the verdict. Decades later, Yanukovych characterised his arrests and imprisonment as "mistakes of youth".On 27 December 1978 both of Yanukovych's convictions were overturned by the Donetsk Regional Court at the initiative of judge Vitaliy Boiko, after an appeal by Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy, then deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In 2005 deputy head prosecutor of Donetsk Oblast initiated a proceeding concerning possible falsification of documents confirming the overturn of Yanukovych's convictions, however in 2006 it was abandoned. According to a local judge, the originals of documents concerning Yanukovych's convictions went missing from the Yenakieve court between 1989 and 2000 due to "insufficient security measures".
Political career: 1996–2010
Yanukovych's political career began when he was appointed as a Vice-Head of Donetsk Oblast Administration in August 1996. On 14 May 1997, he was appointed as the Head of the Administration.Prime Minister (2002–2004)
President Leonid Kuchma appointed Yanukovych to the post of prime minister following Anatoliy Kinakh's resignation. Yanukovych began his term as prime minister on 21 November 2002 following a 234-vote confirmation in the Ukrainian parliament, eight more than needed.In foreign affairs, Yanukovych's cabinet was considered to be politically close to Russia, although declaring support for Ukrainian membership in the European Union. Although Yanukovych's parliamentary coalition was not supporting Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, his cabinet agreed to the commission of Ukrainian troops to the Iraq War in support of the United States' war on terrorism.
2004 presidential campaign
In 2004, as the prime minister, Yanukovych participated in the controversial Ukrainian presidential election as the Party of Regions candidate. Yanukovych's main base of support emerged from the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine, which favored close ties with neighbouring Russia. Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky, who had previously cooperated with Kuchma's administration, took part in his presidential campaign. In the first round of voting held on 31 October 2004, Yanukovych took second place with 39.3 percent of the votes to opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko with 39.8 percent. Because no candidate passed the 50 percent threshold, a second round of voting was scheduled.In the second round of the election, Yanukovych was initially declared the winner. However, the legitimacy of the election was questioned by Ukrainians, international organizations, and foreign governments following allegations of electoral fraud. The resulting widespread protests became known as the Orange Revolution. The second round of the election was subsequently annulled by the Supreme Court of Ukraine, and in the repeated run-off, Yanukovych lost to Yushchenko with 44.2 percent to Yushchenko's 51.9 percent.
After the election, the Ukrainian parliament passed a non-binding motion of no confidence in Yanukovych's government, urging outgoing President Kuchma to dismiss Yanukovych and appoint a caretaker government. Five days after his electoral defeat, Yanukovych declared his resignation from the post of prime minister. In November 2009 Yanukovych stated that he conceded defeat only to avoid violence. "I didn't want mothers to lose their children and wives their husbands. I didn't want dead bodies from Kyiv to flow down the Dnipro. I didn't want to assume power through bloodshed."
After the Orange Revolution
Following his electoral defeat in 2004, Yanukovych led the main opposition party against the Tymoshenko government made up of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, and Oleksandr Moroz's Socialist Party. This government was marred by growing conflict between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. Yanukovych's Party of Regions support allowed for the establishment of Yuriy Yekhanurov's government in late 2005.In October 2004, Ukrainian deputy Hryhoriy Omelchenko accused Yanukovych of having been a member of "a group of individuals who brutally beat and raped a woman, but bought off the victim and the criminal case was closed". The press-service of the Ukrainian Cabinet asserted that Yanukovych suffered for the attempt to defend a girl from hooligans.
In 2005, the Party of Regions signed a collaboration agreement with the Russian political party United Russia. In 2008, Yanukovych spoke at a congress of the United Russia party.
Return to government
2006 election
Following the resignation of his head of administration Oleksandr Zinchenko, president Yushchenko dismissed Yulia Tymoshenko from the post of Prime Minister and appointed Yuriy Yekhanurov as head of a technocratic government which acted until the new parliamentary election.In January 2006, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine started an official investigation of the allegedly false acquittal of the criminal convictions which Yanukovych received in his youth. Yuriy Lutsenko, the head of the ministry, announced that forensic tests proved the forgery of the respective documents and initially claimed that lack of the formal acquittal precluded Yanukovych from running for the seat in the 2006 parliamentary election.
However, the latter statement was corrected within days by Lutsenko, who conceded that the outcome of the investigation into the legality of the Yanukovych's acquittal could not affect his eligibility to run for the parliament seat since the deprivation of his civil rights due to the past convictions would have expired anyway due to the statute of limitations. Yanukovych's Party of Regions won the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election, and Yanukovych returned to premiership when he was appointed to the position of prime minister by Yushchenko in August 2006.
In 2006, a criminal charge was made for the falsification of documents regarding the retraction of Yanukovych's prior conviction. According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta two documents had been forged regarding Yanukovych's robbery in association with rape and assault and battery. The signature of the judge for these documents in Yanukovych's retraction was also reportedly forged.