What Kernes's death meant for Kharkiv's leadership
A look back at the death of the city's mayor from COVID-19 complications in Berlin.
What happened to Kharkiv when its mayor died abroad? On 17 December 2020, Hennadiy Kernes, the serving mayor of Ukraine's second largest city, died in Berlin at the age of 60, from complications caused by COVID-19. He had contracted the virus in September.
The death came during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and in Ukraine, and it removed the head of one of the country's largest municipalities while he was still in office. He died in Germany, where he had been treated for the illness.
For a city of Kharkiv's size, the death of a sitting mayor raised an obvious institutional question: how municipal leadership would continue. Kernes's death also showed that the pandemic's toll reached senior public officials as well as the wider population, with the illness that began in September ending in his death in mid-December.
