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Does this sentence make sense?
'Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said a day earlier that the opposition might sit down with the government for talks if Prime Minister Mykola Azarov's Cabinet is dismissed.' (source)
Aren't "Cabinet" and "the government" the same thing (e.g. in Ukraine)?
The cabinet is the assembly of so-called cabinet-level officials, often labeled ministers or secretaries. The head of government may or may not be formally part of this group. Examples include Germany and the UK.
In some systems, the dismissal of the entire cabinet by either the head of government or the head of state signals a new general election or -- for parliamentary systems -- a new election within the parliament.
The government is headed by the cabinet, but the label "government" often includes a permanent civil service, at least at the higher level. The UK has the Permanent Secretary, while Germany has two kind of Staatssekretär, either senior civil service or almost-cabinet-level political positions.
So the hope of that quote would have been that the political figures would be dismissed and that the speaker would deal directly with the senior civil servants until a new cabinet is formally appointed.
“Government” is somewhat ambiguous in English. It can be essentially synonymous with the word “cabinet” (especially in parliamentary systems) or it can have a broader meaning, covering the civil service and the entire apparatus of the state (“the US government”).
In that case, the meaning is slightly different but reasonably clear: Yatsenyuk was indicating that he was ready to talk to the people in power (and especially the president) provided he fires the cabinet first. This does make sense in a system where the parliament and the head of government are not the main centers of power.
In the US, "government" refers to the entire apparatus running the state. It refers to the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In the UK, it appears to refer to the executive:
The Government runs the country and has responsibility for developing and implementing policy and for drafting laws. It is also known as the Executive.
https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/government/
The head of the government is the Prime Minister, and power is then delegated to the cabinet. Since the cabinet is the highest level of authority other than the Prime Minister, it is often used interchangeably with "government".
When it comes to how the terms are used in Ukraine, I would expect it most of the discussions to take place in Ukrainian, and thus which words are used in an English language newspaper would be based on the usage of the person doing the translating. The article you linked to is an American company, so it is probably intends the US meanings.
As I wrote in a previous answer, there are many definitions of government but according to Oxford, government is simply “the system by which a state or community is controlled or regulated". Meanwhile, a cabinet is a " committee of senior ministers responsible for controlling government policy" in most English speaking democracies like the UK, Canada and Commonwealth nations. In the United States, cabinet means "a body of advisers to the president, composed of the heads of the executive departments of the government". So, a cabinet is a specific group of a government responsible for advising/controlling political policies while a government is a system for controlling or regulating a group of people that may or may not have a cabinet.
'Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said a day earlier that the opposition might sit down with the government for talks if Prime Minister Mykola Azarov's Cabinet is dismissed.'
Basically, the cabinet of the prime minister is just a committee responsible for the executive branch policies that Azarov and other members of the executive branch have to deal with, but they are not the entire government of Ukraine, which also includes branches like the Ukrainian judicial branch.
