What Ukraine faced in mid-April 2020: fires, a quarantine and a budget
A look back at the days around 15 April 2020, when wildfires, a monastery outbreak and an emergency budget change shared the news.
What was Ukraine dealing with on 15 April 2020? The answer, judging by the reports of the preceding days, was several pressures at once: wildfires in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a coronavirus outbreak at a Kyiv monastery, and a rapid change to the state budget.
Fires in the exclusion zone
On 13 April 2020, wildfires in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone reached the abandoned city of Pripyat, 2 km (1.2 mi) from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The following day, 14 April, officials of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine announced that all open fires in the zone had been extinguished.
The fires were part of a series that began burning inside the zone in April 2020. As later described, they were largely extinguished within two weeks, and at least one suspect was arrested for alleged arson. The zone itself, also known as the 30-Kilometre Zone, was established shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
An outbreak at the Lavra
Also on 13 April 2020, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra was placed under quarantine after more than 90 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection there. The closure marked one of the notable local outbreaks recorded in the country as the COVID-19 epidemic developed.
A budget rewritten for the pandemic
The same day, the Verkhovna Rada adopted amendments to the 2020 state budget needed to fight COVID-19. The changes envisaged a threefold increase in the budget deficit.
Taken together, the reports from 13 and 14 April show a country managing an environmental emergency that had apparently been brought under control, while public health and public finances were being reshaped by the epidemic.
