Ukrainian television showed President Leonid Kravchuk on Tuesday operating the handle printing the first experimental samples of the hryvna.
Kravchuk, speaking five days before parliamentary elections, said introducing the hryvna was a vital part of independence, but that the former Soviet republic needed a stabilization fund and more developed reforms before this was possible.Two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a temporary coupon currency, the karbovanets, is in circulation.
Reforms have proceeded much more slowly than in neighboring Russia and hyperinflation has cast much of the country's 52 million population into poverty.
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