sudo apt-get dist-upgrade removed sudo and other programs

Question

I was following this guide on upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04, and after executing sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, I did not bother to check that it prompted me that executing it will remove lots of programs. After dist-upgrade, I noticed that I do not have sudo anymore. I tried installing via install but I get an error that looks like this:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?

How can I recover from this?

So basically you are in the same situation as this --> Can sudo be reinstalled after being removed? — steeldriver, Jul 29 '19 at 00:57
@steeldriver I'm in a worse situation I think, pkexec is not installed and I have to install policykit-1. Running apt-install policykit-1 results in the error message I posted. — akubi, Jul 29 '19 at 01:00
Probably safer to reinstall whole system, since you don't know what other programs are messed up. — Daniel, Jul 29 '19 at 01:15
@Daniel that seems to be the only thing to do in this situation... — akubi, Jul 29 '19 at 01:23
Had you enabled root login? By default it's disabled, but if you've enabled it, login as root so you don't have to use sudo. — guiverc, Jul 29 '19 at 01:30
Related (but not a duplicate): How to restore a system after accidentally removing all kernels? shows how to chroot from a live environment to use an installed system's package manager. Andrea Corbellini's answer to Ubuntu system is broken after accidentally uninstalling many packages shows how to install potentially many missing packages even if you're not sure what packages they are (or see Where are the logs for apt-get?) You shouldn't need to reinstall. — Eliah Kagan, Jul 29 '19 at 01:42

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade removed sudo and other programs

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