As coronavirus cases rise in Ukraine, reports of an imminent hard lockdown continue to appear in the local media. Now, a top official has confirmed that a lockdown is coming — the question is only when.
“The only issue is when it will be imposed: either in December or starting on Jan. 2. Discussions with specialists on this subject are currently ongoing…,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, told the Ukraina 24 TV channel on Dec. 1.
“But the fact that there will be a lockdown — it’s 100%,” he added.
Earlier on Nov. 30, President Volodymyr Zelensky held a teleconference with the Cabinet of Ministers to discuss the need for a lockdown.
That same day, the Segodnya news site, citing an unnamed source in the Cabinet, reported that the government had agreed to impose a three-week lockdown from Dec. 23 to Jan. 15. So far, that information has not been confirmed.
Exactly how a new lockdown would work has also been the subject of intense discussion. Earlier, David Arakhamia, leader of the Zelensky’s Servant of the People faction in parliament, told the Ukraina 24 TV channel that it was 90% likely that a lockdown would be imposed. However, it wouldn’t be just any lockdown, but an “intellectual” one, he said.
That comment provoked laughter online. On Dec. 1, Arakhamia clarified that “intellectual lockdown” meant that different regions would exit it at different times, depending on their local epidemiological situations.
The government discussed this approach during one of several consultations that included the Cabinet ministers and the heads of parliamentary fractions, Arakhamia said, and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal insisted that a second lockdown would not simply be a copy of the lockdown Ukraine imposed in spring.
However, no formal decision has been made yet.
“As far as I know, the government still doesn’t have a final model for the lockdown, but it is being worked out in order to decrease the economic losses,” Arakhamia said.
Some agencies are more certain about the lockdown. Infrastructure Minister Vladyslav Krykliy has insisted that public transport — within cities, between different cities and oblasts and even internationally — will continue to operate during a lockdown.
“For example, if you don’t need to go to work because there’s a quarantine, or to the shopping mall because it’s closed, then the burden on public transport will be less,” he told the TSN news show.
Over the past two months, COVID-19 cases have increased rapidly in Ukraine. On Nov. 28, the country reported a record of 16,294 new cases in the past 24 hours.
On Nov. 11, the Ukrainian government imposed a weekend lockdown for three weeks, requiring non-essential businesses to close on Saturdays and Sundays. Although the move was intended as a compromise between imposing a full lockdown and not intensifying quarantine restrictions at all, it faced strong pushback from business owners and regional leaders, some of whom openly disobeyed it.
On Nov. 30, Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said he would not propose extending the weekend lockdown. Although he noted a decrease in the dynamics of COVID-19 case growth, he also didn’t call the measure a success.
“We did not achieve the result that we expected from the beginning,” he told Ukraine 24. “Ukrainians did not fully adhere to the quarantine as we dictated it.”
