What did Kyiv's change of government on 4 March 2020 mean?
A retrospective on the Verkhovna Rada's vote that ended the Honcharuk cabinet after less than six months and opened the way to a new prime minister.
How quickly can a Ukrainian government rise and fall? On 5 March 2020, the day after the Verkhovna Rada voted out Oleksiy Honcharuk's cabinet, the answer was: in less than six months.
On 4 March 2020, the Rada accepted the resignation of the government and began forming a new one under Denys Shmygal. President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed Shmygal as Prime Minister. The vote closed the tenure of a cabinet that had held office for under six months.
Context and implications
The sequence was brisk. The Rada did not leave a gap: the same day it accepted the departure of one cabinet, it started assembling the next. The proposal for the new Prime Minister came from the president, which placed Zelensky at the centre of the handover.
The short life of the Honcharuk government is the central point of the episode. A cabinet that lasted less than six months left the country with a fresh set of ministers to be approved and a new head of government to be confirmed. Beyond that, the reports from 4 March 2020 do not say what lay behind the change or what policies would follow, and any judgement on its effect belongs to later events.
An international backdrop
The same day, outside Ukraine, Canadian Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne urged Iran to allow access to the flight recorders of the Ukrainian passenger plane shot down in January. The aircraft was Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a Boeing 737-800 flying from Tehran to Kyiv. As later established, it was shot down on 8 January 2020 by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shortly after takeoff, and all 176 people on board were killed.
The two stories were separate, but they unfolded together: a domestic reshuffle in Kyiv and a continuing diplomatic push over the recorders of a Ukrainian airliner.
