Turning the pages back... July 10, 1994 (07/09/00)

Turning the pages back...

July 10, 1994

Despite dire predictions from political pundits worldwide that an independent Ukraine was unstable and would not be able to sustain a peaceful transfer of power, Leonid Kuchma was elected as the second president of Ukraine three years after independence. The Ukrainian Weekly published this story:

In an upset victory, Leonid Danylovych Kuchma was elected Ukraine's second president on Sunday, July 10, beginning a new era - for better or worse - in this country of 52 million people. Mr. Kuchma, 55, is the former director of the world's largest rocket factory and an ex-prime minister of Ukraine ...

"As president of Ukraine, I will always work in the interests of Ukraine as a whole, not in the interests of separate regions," said the president-elect during his first press conference. ... "The first thing I want is national reconciliation ... What has been done during this presidential marathon is a crime. To say there is confrontation between the west and east is a political game." ...

It was a close race to the end, but over 14 million, or 52 percent of Ukraine's citizen's cast their ballots for Mr. Kuchma. Mr. [Leonid] Kravchuk got 45 percent of the vote ...

"The split between the east and the west was used to mobilize the electorate in eastern Ukraine. It became a challenge to eastern Ukrainians to prove that they were just as committed to the electoral process," said Viktor Nebozhenko, an independent sociologist ...

Mr. Kuchma attributed his victory to Mr. Kravchuk's failure to tackle Ukraine's economic decline since independence ...

Source: "Ukraine elects Leonid Kuchma president; Eastern industrialist is second president of post-Soviet Ukraine" by Marta Kolomayets, The Ukrainian Weekly, July 17, 1994, Vol. LXII, No. 29.

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