Early Life
Viktor Yanukovych was born in the village of Zhukovka near Yenakiieve in Donetsk Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. He had a very hard childhood, on which he commented by saying: "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 not ethnically Ukrainian, but rather of Russian, Polish, and Belarusian descent. Yanukovych is a surname of Belarusian origin (Belarusian name Yanuk is a derivative of the Catholic name Yan (“John”). A Crimean newspaper claimed, in November 2011, his surname was a derivative of the Tatar name Yanhilde. His mother was a Russian nurse, who died when Yanukovych was two years old, and his father was a Polish-Belarusian locomotive driver, originally from Yanuki, Vitsebsk Voblast. By the time he was a teenager, Yanukovych had lost both his parents 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 he has no contact with them.
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