Dnipropetrovsk Oblast


Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, also commonly known as Dnipropetrovshchyna, is an oblast in simultaneously southern, eastern and central Ukraine, the most important industrial region of the country. It was created on February 27, 1932. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast has a population of about approximately 80% of whom live centering on administrative centers: Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, Kamianske, Nikopol and Pavlohrad. The Dnieper River runs through the oblast.

Geography

Most of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, including Dnipro Raion, is located in eastern Ukraine, though some parts are in central and southern Ukraine, such as Kamianske Raion and Nikopol Raion, respectively. The area of the oblast comprises about 5.3% of the total area of the country. Its longitude from north to south is 130 km, from east to west – 300 km. The oblast borders the Poltava and Kharkiv oblasts on the north, the Donetsk Oblast on the east, the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts on the south, and the Mykolaiv and Kirovohrad oblasts on the west. Historically, it is located in the region of Zaporizhzhia.
The Black Sea Lowland covers about half of the territory of the oblast, where it lies only within the west bank of the Dnieper. In Terny, a Ternivsky meteorite crater is located. It is in diameter and its age is estimated at 280 ± 10 million years. The crater is not exposed at the surface. The Dnieper Upland contains a number of minerals including iron, manganese, granite, graphite, brown coal, and kaolin. Kryvbas is an important economic region, specializing in iron ore mining and the steel industry. It is arguably the main iron ore region of Eastern Europe. Named after the city of Kryvyi Rih, the mining base of the region occupies the southwestern part of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, as well as the small neighboring parts of the Kirovohrad and Kherson Oblasts.
The region possesses major deposits of iron ore and some other metallurgical ores. To exploit them, several large mining companies were founded here in the middle of the 20th century. Most of them are located in Kryvyi Rih itself, which is the longest city in Europe.

Geology

Much of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast is located within the boundaries of the Ukrainian Shield and only the northern regions and the extreme eastern part of the territory are confined to the south-eastern side of the Dnipro-Donets depression.
In the geological structure of the region, the breeds come from the archaea, the Proterozoic, the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic.

History

In the 6th to 8th centuries AD the first settlements of Slavs appeared on the banks of the Dnieper within the region. During the period of Kievan Rus' the Dnieper River functioned as one of the main trade corridors of medieval Eastern Europe, part of the route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", which connected the Baltic Sea region with the Crimea and with the capital of Byzantium, Constantinople. The Dnieper also served as a major route for transporting the armies of Kyiv princes on their way to the Byzantine coastal cities in the early 9th and late 9th centuries.
At the beginning of the 15th century, Tatar tribes inhabiting the right bank of the Dnieper were driven away by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, by the mid-15th century, the Nogai and the Crimean Khanate invaded these lands. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate agreed to a border along the Dnieper, and farther east along the Samara River, i.e. through what is today the city of Dnipro. At this time there appeared a new force, the Cossacks - armed free men not subject to any feudal lord - who soon came to dominate the region. They later became known as Zaporozhian Cossacks, from Zaporizhzhia, the lands south of Naddniprianshchyna. This period of raids and fighting caused considerable devastation and depopulation in the Pontic steppe; the area became known as the "Wilderness" or the "Wild Fields".
In 1635, the Polish government built the Kodak fortress above the Dnieper Rapids at Kodaky, partly as a result of rivalry in the region between Poland, Turkey and the Crimean Khanate, and partly to maintain control over Cossack activity. On the night of 3 or 4 August 1635, the Cossacks of Ivan Sulyma captured the fort by surprise, burning it down and butchering the garrison of about 200 West European mercenaries under Jean Marion. The fort, rebuilt by French engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan for the Polish government in 1638, had a mercenary garrison. Kodak was captured by Zaporozhian Cossacks on 1 October 1648, and was garrisoned by the Cossacks until its demolition in accordance with the Treaty of the Pruth in 1711.
Under the Treaty of Pereyaslav of 1654, the territory came within the sphere of influence of the Moscow-based Tsardom of Russia. In 1774 Prince Grigori Potemkin was appointed governor of Novorossiysk Governorate, and after the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, he started founding cities in the region and encouraging foreign settlers. The city of Yekaterinoslav was founded in 1776, not in its current location, but at the confluence of the River Samara with the River Kil'chen' at Loshakivka, north of the Dnieper. On May 8, 1775, after the end of the Russian-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, Russian authorities opened a postal station and track which linked Kremenchuk city, the Kinburn foreland and Ochakiv, all locations of the Imperial Russian Army.
In December 1796, Emperor Paul I re-established the Novorossiysk Governorate, mostly with land from the former Yekaterinoslav Viceroyalty. In 1802, this province was divided into the Nikolayev Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and the Taurida Governorate. The capital of the Yekaterinoslav Governorate was the city of Yekaterinoslav. It was located within the former lands of the Zaporizhian Sich. The governorate bordered to the north with the Kharkov Governorate and Poltava Governorate, to the west and southwest with the Kherson Governorate, to the south with the Taurida Governorate and Sea of Azov, and to the east with the Don Host Oblast.
Olexander Paul discovered iron ore and initiated smelting, and this became the core of a developing a mining district. In 1874 Emperor Alexander II initiated the founding project of a railway, running. This enabled transportation directly to the nearest factories and greatly sped up the development of the region.
On 1 August 1925, the Yekaterinoslav Governorate administration was discontinued, and in 1926 the city of Yekterinoslav was renamed Dnipropetrovsk after Ukrainian Soviet leader Grigory Petrovsky. Before the introduction of oblasts in 1932, the Ukrainian SSR comprised 40 okrugs, which had replaced the former Russian Imperial guberniya subdivisions. In 1932 the territory of the Ukrainian SSR was re-organized into oblasts. The first oblasts were Vinnytsia Oblast, Kyiv Oblast, Odesa Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Soon after that, in the summer of 1932, Donetsk Oblast was formed out of eastern parts of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.
During the Holodomor in the 1930s, more than 200 collective farms in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast were put on "Blackboards" which implied a complete blockade of trade and food-aid to villages under-performing in fulfilling grain-procurement quotas; a number representing more than half of all such "Blackboards" throughout all of the Ukrainian SSR.
During the 1991 referendum, 90.36% of votes in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast favored the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine. A survey conducted in December 2014 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found 2.2% of the oblast's population supported their region joining Russia, 89.9% did not support the idea, and the rest were undecided or did not respond.
The city of Dnipropetrovsk was renamed "Dnipro" in May 2016 as part of the decommunization laws enacted a year earlier. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast could not be renamed at the time because it is mentioned by name in the Constitution of Ukraine and accordingly, could only be renamed through a constitutional amendment. In April 2018 a group of over a hundred deputies formally initiated a proposal in the Ukrainian Parliament to change the name to Sicheslav Oblast; in February 2019, the Verkhovna Rada voted to officially amend the Constitution, thus granting state sanction to the name change. Later that year the Constitutional Court officially approved the change. The oblast's administrative centre and largest city, Dnipro, had had the unofficial name "Sicheslav" in 1918–21 during the Ukrainian War of Independence. Since then, the renaming process has stalled, for reasons such as the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the supplementing martial law.
During the Russian invasion, the cities of Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and Nikopol, among other locations in the region, were bombed by Russia. It was also reported that Russian troops were pushed from areas near Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Kherson Oblast, near the border. One village bordering Kherson Oblast, Hannivka, may have been occupied and liberated by Ukrainian forces by May 2022. Between 2022 and 2024, there was no further ground fighting and the oblast had remained completely under Ukrainian control. In June 2025, the Institute for the Study of War confirmed that Russian troops entered Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

Administrative subdivisions

The following data incorporates the number of each type of administrative divisions of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast:
  • Administrative center – 1
  • Raions – 7;
  • City districts – 18 ;
  • Settlements – 1504, including:
  • * Villages – 1438;
  • * Cities/Towns – 66, including:
  • ** Urban-type settlements – 46;
  • ** Cities – 20.
  • Village communities – 288.
The local administration of the oblast is controlled by the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Rada. The governor of the oblast is the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Rada speaker, appointed by the President of Ukraine.
Since July 2020, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast consists of the following seven raions: