Ukraine swaps adaptive quarantine for weekend lockdown
A look back at the day the Cabinet of Ministers changed Ukraine's pandemic rules, two days after the president tested positive.
What did Ukraine's government do about COVID-19 on 11 November 2020? It changed course. The Cabinet of Ministers abolished the adaptive quarantine and introduced a weekend lockdown.
The decision came against a tense political backdrop. On 9 November 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky tested positive for COVID-19, as did the head of the Office of the President, Andriy Yermak. Another top government official was also reported to have tested positive. The news placed the pandemic at the centre of Kyiv's political life only two days before the Cabinet moved to tighten the rules.
The weekend lockdown replaced the adaptive quarantine, the framework that had been in force until then. The Cabinet's decision marked a shift from the earlier approach to a regime built around restrictions on weekends.
The pandemic was not the only major story in the region that week. On 9 November 2020, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that he had signed a deal with Azerbaijan and Russia to end the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. A Kremlin spokesman confirmed the agreement, and Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, described it as a trilateral agreement. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, said Russian peacekeepers would be deployed. The deal ceded several districts to Azerbaijan, including the Lachin District, and provided for a transport corridor through Armenia linking Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan.
For Ukraine, 11 November 2020 was above all a day of domestic decision-making: a government steering the country's pandemic response in a new direction while its president and the head of his office were infected.
