Leonid Kravchuk

November 1990.

Yeltsin for Russia and Kravchuk for Ukraine sign a treaty.

Article 6.

Each side respects the other's territory within the borders now existing inside the USSR.

December 8th, 1991.

A state dacha near Viskuli in Belarus.

Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkovich sign an agreement.

It says the Soviet Union ceases to exist.

This is typically what all authoritarian leaders did.

And Ukraine at the same time had elections where the current president, then, then President, uh, Leonid Kravchuk, lost elections and walked away.

That's also very important for America as a lesson because we actually lived through it, through this.

Democracy has few tests, and one very important test, maybe it's crucial looking at Ukraine, is peaceful transition of power.

However, the problem, weak center and strong regions required a new approach to state building in Ukraine.

What happened, however, is that the president at the time, Leonid Kravchuk, and his prime minister, Vytaut Fokin, at the time, they had chosen not to building your model for governance of Ukraine based on the ideas of democracy and driven by the idea of the national consolidation.

What they have decided is to implement the Soviet model of governance in Ukraine, which was, first of all, it was inadequate for the ideological agenda.

And second of all, it was inapplicable, even institutional, for Ukraine because it had a weak center and strong regions.

So the model that Kravchuk and Fokin had chosen, the model of the so-called diktat, essentially authoritarian leadership, the Russian model of governance, It was based on the idea of extracting resources from the regions and the dictatorial powers of the center.

So essentially, the center says what you do.

what regions should do.

It was very easy for him to restore centralized control over the regions.