Can anyone explain this?

My Debian 10 Linode booted a new kernel yesterday (4.19.0-12) pursuant to a regular update via apt update/upgrade. All of a sudden, I can't look at my ssh(1) config files (logged in as root here…not sudo):

root@dave:/etc# ll ssh*
total 592
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 565189 Apr  8  2019 moduli
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1580 Apr  8  2019 ssh_config
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   3296 Oct 13 07:57 sshd_config
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   3235 Jul 16  2019 sshd_config.dpkg-dist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   3248 Oct  8  2019 sshd_config.ucf-dist
-rw------- 1 root root    505 Jul 15  2019 ssh_host_ecdsa_key
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    176 Jul 15  2019 ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub
-rw------- 1 root root    411 Jul 15  2019 ssh_host_ed25519_key
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     96 Jul 15  2019 ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub
-rw------- 1 root root   1823 Jul 15  2019 ssh_host_rsa_key
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    396 Jul 15  2019 ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
root@dave:/etc# ll sshd_config
ls: cannot access 'sshd_config': No such file or directory
root@dave:/etc# more sshd_config
ls: cannot access 'sshd_config': No such file or directory
root@dave:/etc# more ucf.conf
<contents redacted>
root@dave:/etc# more passed
<contents redacted>

I get the same behavior on the Lish/Glish console.

Color me puzzled…

-- sw