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Kharkiv Oblast (translit. Kharkivs’ka oblast’; also referred to as Kharkivshchyna - ) is an oblast (province) in eastern Ukraine. The oblast borders Russia to the north, Luhansk Oblast to the east, Donetsk Oblast to the south-east, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to the south-west, Poltava Oblast to the west and Sumy Oblast to the north-west. The area of the oblast is 31,400 km², corresponding to 5.2% of the total territory of Ukraine. The oblast is the third most populous region of Ukraine, with a population of 2,857,751, more than half (1.5 million) of whom live in the city of Kharkiv, the oblast's administrative center. While the Russian language is primarily spoken in the cities of Kharkiv oblast, elsewhere in the oblast most inhabitants Ukrainian. In April 2006, the Kharkiv oblast council voted to give the Russian language official status in the oblast, however the Constitution of Ukraine has declared that Ukrainian is the only official language in the country and that the council had overstepped its mandate. History
The territory of the Kharkiv oblast has been permanently inhabited since at least the late Paleolithic period (10,000–12,000 years ago) but archaeological evidence indicates a human (Neanderthal) presence as early as the Mousterian period some 80,000 years ago. The territory was relatively sparsely inhabited until the 1630s, when large numbers of Ukrainians began to settle there before and during the Chmielnicki Uprising. Most of the settlers were migrants from the Dnieper region, many of whom were fleeing fighting between Cossacks, Poles and Tatars. They called the newly settled region the Sloboda Ukraine ("word sloboda means fortress, mostly made of wood") or Slobozhanshchina, as the area is still sometimes called, and ruled it from the newly established fortress-city of Kharkov (founded 1656). In 1654, the region was incorporated into Muscovy (and subsequently the Russian Empire) under the terms of the Treaty of Pereyaslav. Over the next 340 years, the area became heavily Russified. Kharkiv itself became one of the cultural and administrative centres of the Russian Empire in the mid-18th century, and served as the capital of the Ukrainian SSR from 1919 until 1934, when the Soviet authorities moved the capital back to Kiev. The modern Kharkiv oblast is a relatively recent creation, having been established on 27 February 1932. Kharkiv Oblast together with Kiev Oblast were two most suffering region. The region saw major fighting during World War II in several Battles of Kharkov between 1941 and 1943. Research Tips
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