Born in 1950 into a family of a metal worker and a nurse in Yenakiyevo, near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, he lost both his parents by the age of 5.
While still a teenager, he was convicted, in 1967, of robbery. Three years later, he was jailed for severely beating someone.
Ukrainian opposition deputies have asserted that Yanukovych was guilty of more serious crimes. They claimed he tore earrings from people's ears and tried to rape a girl. The records of these offenses have apparently disappeared from the police station where they were held.
Also missing are the records of a criminal case against Yanukovych in the mid-1970s. At the time he was the director of the transportation department of a mining company in his hometown and was accused of large-scale theft of state property.
In 1978, at the formal request of cosmonaut Georgy Beregovy, the Donetsk regional court cleared Yanukovych on all counts. There are now no records in the archives of any convictions against the current prime minister.
At the age of 30, Yanukovych received a degree in mechanical engineering. He then began a successful career as a transport executive in the coal-mining industry in Donetsk, Ukraine's industrial powerhouse populated by 5 million people.
In order to bring peace to the? Donetsk region, Kuchma appointed Yanukovych as Donetsk governor in May 1997, since he was regarded as a key figure in the business empire of Donetsk's richest businessman, Rynat Akhmetov, the head of the Donetsk clan.
The Donetsk clan is one of several geographically defined oligarchic groups that compete to dominate Ukrainian business and politics.
As governor of Donetsk, Yanukovych subdued powerful local trade unions and the Communist Party and, in cooperation with Akhmetov, unified the warring local businesses clans into a single political force.
According to media reports, Kuchma went to Donetsk in 1998 and made the Donetsk clan an offer. If the clan supported him in his re-election, he would not ask questions about how the clan made its money.
Contrary to expectations, the traditionally Communist region gave more votes to Kuchma than to Communist candidate Petro Symonenko in the 1999 presidential election runoff.
In the parliamentary elections of? 2002, the pro-Kuchma For a United Ukraine bloc led the voting in Donetsk.
Yanukovych came onto the national political scene in November 2002, when Kuchma appointed him prime minister.
Even if Yanukovych has little influence over the Kiev clan of Viktor Medvedchuk, Kuchma's chief of staff, or the Dnipropetrovsk clan of Viktor Pinchuk, Kuchma's son-in-law, the two clans prefer him to Yushchenko, the main opposition candidate, who has promised to end corruption if elected.
Yanukovych is married and has two sons.
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