Leonid Kravchuk, independent Ukraine’s 1st president, dies

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Leonid Kravchuk, who led Ukraine to independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as its first president, has died at age 88. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kravchuk died Tuesday. Kravchuk led Ukraine as its Communist Party boss in the waning years of the Soviet Union, and played a pivotal role in the demise of the USSR before holding the Ukrainian presidency from 1991 through 1994. Zelenskyy paid tribute to him by calling him not just a historical figure but “a man who knew how to find wise words and to say them so that all Ukrainians would hear them.”