Leonid Kadeniuk

Leonid Kostyantynovych Kadenyuk (Леонід Костянтинович Каденюк, 28 January 1951 – 31 January 2018) was the first astronaut of independent Ukraine. He flew on NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as part of the international mission STS-87. Kadenyuk held the rank of Major General in the Ukrainian Air Force.

Biography
Kadenyuk was a Soviet military pilot. He began his service in the Soviet Air Forces and was selected in 1976 for the Soviet Cosmonaut Corps being on a team of test pilots of the Soviet new space shuttle Buran, but was removed after marital issues. He was allowed to rejoin the Cosmonaut Detachment several years later. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, Kadenyuk remained in the Russian Space Forces and adopted Ukrainian citizenship. In 1995, during the preparation of the first Ukrainian space mission, he volunteered to take part and returned to his homeland.

There were two main candidates for the mission, the other being Yaroslav Pustovyi, a civil Ukrainian scientist in space research. Kadeniuk was chosen as better-trained and accustomed to space mission organization.

After the flight, Leonid Kadeniuk continued his Ukrainian space program career in the State Space Agency of Ukraine.

In the 2002 parliamentary election, he was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in the list of pro-Kuchma United Ukraine Bloc. Later, Kadeniuk joined the "Trudova Ukrayina - Industrialists and Entrepreneurs" faction, but hadn't been politically active. He worked within parliament's Committee on Defense and National Security.

In the 2006 parliamentary election, Kadenyuk was #3 in the electoral party list of Lytvyn's People's Bloc, but the block won only 2.44% of the popular vote (short of the required 3%) and no seats in the parliament.

Kadenyuk died on 31 January 2018, three days after turning 67.