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# Oblasts (Regions) and Autonomous Republics (Ukraine)

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Last modified: 2026-04-11 by martin karner
Keywords: ukraine | gonfalon | cyrillic | oblast |
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Ukraine with its first level divisions, the Oblasts (source).

- First Order Subdivisions (Oblasts [Regions], Cities with special status and Autonomous Republics)
- Overview – Names in Ukrainian

See also:

- Clickable map of Ukrainian Subdivisions
- Ukraine – Municipalities
- Ukraine
- Contemporary flags of the Ukrainian regions: Old traditions and new designs (by Andriy Grechylo, ICV 20, 2003)
- Symbols of the New Districts in Ukraine: Chervonohrad Raion as an Example (by Andriy Grechylo, Heraldry in South Eastern Europe, 2022)

## First Order Subdivisions (Oblasts [Regions], Cities with special status and Autonomous Republics)

(Ordered in the usual Cyrillic alphabetic order; in brackets, where appropriate, the capital’s name in the original Ukrainian spelling, you'll need a Cyrillic font in encoding Win1251 to see them correctly.)

- Cherkasy Oblast (Черкаси)
- Chernihiv Oblast (Чернігів)
- Chernivtsi Oblast (Чернівці)
- Autonomous Republic of Crimea (Крым (Крим))
- Dnipropetrovsk Oblast (Днiпропетровськ)
- Donetsk Oblast (Донецьк)
- Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (Івано-Франкiвськ)
- Kharkiv Oblast (Харків)
- Kherson Oblast (Херсон)
- Khmelnytskyi Oblast (Хмельницький)
- Kirovohrad Oblast (Кіровоград)
- City of Kyiv (Київ)
- Kyiv Oblast (Київ)
- Luhansk Oblast (Луганськ)
- Lviv Oblast (Львів)
- Mykolaiv Oblast (Миколаїв)
- Odesa Oblast (Одеса)
- Poltava Oblast (Полтава)
- Rivne Oblast (Рівне)
- City of Sevastopol (Севастополь)
- Sumy Oblast (Суми)
- Ternopil Oblast (Тернопіль)
- Vinnytsia Oblast (Вiнниця)
- Volyn Oblast (Луцьк)
- Zakarpattia Oblast (Закарпатська)
- Zaporizhzhia Oblast (Запоріжжя)
- Zhytomyr Oblast (Житомір)

List edited by Victor Lomantsov

## Overview – Names in Ukrainian

Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet but (like Serbian or Bulgarian) with some differences respective to Russian (and unlike linguistically unrelated languages of the former Soviet Union, whose more recent orthography was set in such way that it includes most of the spelling rules or Russian, even when they don't make any sense): The main one is in the value the letters "i", "y" and "i"".

1. Russian "y", which looks like "bI", doesn't exist in Ukrainian. It's (equivalent) sound is represented by Russian "i", which looks like flipped "N".
2. The sound of Russian "i" (which looks like flipped "N") is represented by a Cyrillic letter unused in the current Russian orthography that looks exactly like Latin alphabet "i".
3. This letter that looks exactly like Latin alphabet "i" sometimes occurs with a "dieresis sign" – in that case it sounds like Russian "i-kratkoe plus regular i", i.e. "eey".
4. Finally, Russian "i-kratkoe" (short "i", looks like a flipped "N" with a breve diacritical), is identical in Ukrainian, both in sound and looks.

Now, usual transcription to English gives "y" for letter #1, "i" for #2, either "yi", "i"" or "ji" for #3, and either "y" or "j" for #4 (yes, there are inconsistencies here!); however "scientific" script-to-script transliteration (one-to-one, regardless of phonetics) gives "i" for #1, some variation of it to #2, and the previous plus the dieresis sign to #3.

To make things worse, there are separate Russian names for most Ukrainian toponyms, that may differ more than just in orthography: and good example is the capital Kiev, spelt "KNEB" in Russian (with "kee-yev" sound) and spelt "KNIB" in Ukrainian (with "k*yeev" sound – "*" is an accented schwa) – in what would be spelt "KbIN~NB" in Russian, if instead of a assimilated name it would be a simple transcription.

António Martins, 8 July 1999