Three signals from Ukraine's public life in early November 2018

What did Ukraine's public agenda look like on 8 November 2018? Three developments, spread across the first week of the month, offer a partial answer.

On 8 November 2018, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a resolution on marking at state level the 75th anniversary of the start of the deportation of Ukrainians from Poland in 1944–1951. The decision placed a historical commemoration on the official calendar, and it was an act of parliament rather than of the executive.

Five days earlier, on 3 November 2018, President Petro Poroshenko signed an agreement on cooperation with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. The signing was an act of the head of state, taken in the field of relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The most sombre event came on 4 November 2018. Kateryna Handziuk, an anti-corruption activist, died of injuries suffered in an acid attack on 31 July in Kherson. Her death, more than three months after the attack, turned a case of violence against an activist into a fatal one and put the issue of corruption in Ukraine back at the centre of public attention.

Taken together, these items show a state active in matters of memory and church relations while a death linked to anti-corruption activism weighed on public life. They do not make a single story, but they show what the public agenda held as the week of 8 November 2018 closed.