Family and Personal Life
Leonid Kuchma is married to Lyudmila Kuchma, the Honorary President of the National Fund of Social Protection of Mothers and Children "Ukraine to Children". Kuchma's only daughter Elena Pinchuk founded the ANTIAIDS Foundation in 2003. She is married to politician Viktor Pinchuk, an industrialist and philanthropist whose Victor Pinchuk Foundation regularly hosts a philanthropic forum at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. Olena Pinchuk has a son Roman (born in 1991, from her previous marriage with Ukrainian businessman Igor Franchuk) who attends Brown University, and two daughters with Viktor Pinchuk, Katerina (born in 2003) and Veronica (2011).
According to the Ukrainian magazine Focus, Olena Pinchuk is amongst the top 10 most influential women in Ukraine in 2010.
Kuchma was an amateur guitar player in his younger years. He was also known for his skill at the complicated card game preferans. He was allowed to keep the state-owned dacha in Koncha-Zaspa for his personal use upon completion of his state duties. The government order #15-r that would allowed for Kuchma to keep his estate was signed by the acting prime-minister Mykola Azarov on 19 January 2005. Kuchma was also allowed to keep his full presidential salary and all the service personnel along with two state-owned vehicles. That order also stated that for everything it would paid out of the state budget.
- Related government issues
The next month a minister of Justice Roman Zvarych said that he has intentions to review that order. On 28 February 2005 the government of Tymoshenko canceled the order, but the new government of Yanukovych reinstated it once again on 18 April 2007.
Read more about this topic: Leonid Kuchma
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, family, personal and/or life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Life is not an easy matter.... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)