Victor Pavlovich Yakunin (born 18 January 1931) is a former Soviet-Russian diplomat who served as the Soviet Ambassador to Pakistan from 1985 until 1993. [1] He was preceded by Vitaly S. Smirnov and his tenure is considered to be notable in the events including the death and state funeral of President Zia-ul-Haq and witnessing the general elections held in 1988 that saw Benazir Bhutto's becoming the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, and the normalization of foreign relations between Pakistan and Russia. [2]
Vitaly S. Smirnov was the Soviet ambassador to Pakistan during the 1980s. His tenure was characterised by several notable events in Pakistan–USSR relations, including the Soviet–Afghan War and the Badaber Uprising in Peshawar in 1985. Permanent Representative of Belarus to the United Nations (1967–1974).
The state funeral of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was held on 19 August 1988 in the Shah Faisal Mosque located in Islamabad, Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) who was also serving as the President of Pakistan, had died in a C-130 Hercules plane, call sign: Pak-1, crashed near the Sutlej river on 17 August 1988. Several conspiracy theories exists regarding this incident, as other high-profile civilian and military personnel also died in the crash including the Chairman Joint chiefs General Akhtar Abdur Rehman and the United States Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Lewis Raphel, and the military attaché, Brigadier General Herbert M. Wassom.
The President of Pakistan, is the head of state of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the civilian Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Armed Forces, per the Constitution of Pakistan. The office-holder represents the "unity of the Republic". The current President of Pakistan is the 13th president, Arif Alvi.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he was succeeded as Russian Ambassador to Pakistan and eventually retired from the diplomatic services in 1993. [3]
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk. It spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, and over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.
During his tenure, he also successfully worked towards repatriation to Soviet soldiers held as POWs by the Afghan Mujaheedin and safely returning them back to Soviet Union in 1989-91. [4]
Repatriation is the process of returning an asset, an item of symbolic value or a person – voluntarily or forcibly – to its owner or their place of origin or citizenship. The term may refer to non-human entities, such as converting a foreign currency into the currency of one's own country, as well as to the process of returning military personnel to their place of origin following a war. It also applies to diplomatic envoys, international officials as well as expatriates and migrants in time of international crisis. For refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants, repatriation can mean either voluntary return or deportation.
Shuravi, shouravi, or shurawi is the Persian term for the word "Soviet", it has been derived from the word shura (شورا), a word of Arabic origin meaning "council".
