What did Ukraine's emergency declaration mean by 27 March 2020?
A look back at the emergency regime and the high-profile arrest that marked the final week of March 2020.
What was Ukraine's public agenda on 27 March 2020? Two developments from two days earlier, on 25 March, framed it.
On 25 March 2020, the Cabinet of Ministers introduced a 30-day state of emergency across the whole country because of the spread of the coronavirus disease. The decision applied nationwide, not to individual regions, and set a fixed 30-day period.
On the same day, security forces arrested former Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara. He was charged with the murder of advertising mogul Sergiy Starytsky.
The two events were unrelated, but together they showed the range of matters facing Ukrainian public institutions in the last week of March 2020: an emergency regime imposed on the entire country and a criminal case against a former senior official. This retrospective does not trace what followed; it records the position as it stood on 27 March 2020, when the emergency regime was in its third day of a 30-day term.
