Place:Dnipropetrovs'k, Dnipropetrovs'k, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine

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Dnipro, previously called Dnipropetrovsk from 1926 until May 2016, is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the eastern part of Ukraine, southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnieper River, after which it is named. Dnipro is the administrative centre of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. It hosts the administration of Dnipro urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. It has a population of

Archeological findings suggest that the first fortified town in the territory of present-day Dnipro probably dates to the mid-16th century.^[1] Other findings suggest that the town Samar, now a neighborhood in Dnipro's Samarskyi District, existed in the 1520s.^[2][3]

Known as Yekaterinoslav (Ekaterinoslav) until 1925, the city was formally inaugurated in 1787 by its then namesake, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, as the administrative centre of the newly acquired vast territories of imperial New Russia, including those ceded to Russia by the Ottoman Empire under the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774). As governor-general of these territories, Grigory Potemkin originally envisioned the city as the Russian Empire's third capital city, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Renamed Dniepropetrovsk in 1926, it became a vital industrial centre of Soviet Ukraine, one of the key centres of the nuclear, arms, and space industries of the Soviet Union. In particular, it is home to the Yuzhmash, a major space and ballistic-missile design bureau and manufacturer. Because of its military industry, it functioned as a closed city until the 1990s. During the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004 the city achieved country-wide notoriety due to mass election fraud committed by local authorities. On 19 May 2016, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada changed the official name of the city from Dnipropetrovsk to Dnipro.^[4]

Following the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Dnipro rapidly developed as a logistical hub for humanitarian aid and a reception point for people fleeing the war on multiple fronts.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Middle Ages

A monastery was founded by Byzantine monks on Monastyrskyi Island, probably in the 9th century (870 AD). The Tatars destroyed the monastery in 1240.

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. By the mid-15th century, the Nogai (who lived north of the Sea of Azov) 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 (Dnieper), i.e. through what is today the city of Dnipro. It was in this time that a new force appeared: the free people, the Cossacks. They later became known as Zaporozhian Cossacks (Zaporizhia – the lands south of Prydniprovye, translate as "The Land Beyond the Weirs [Rapids]"). This was a period of raids and fighting causing considerable devastation and depopulation in that area. The area became known as the Wild Fields.

Early modern

Archeological findings strongly suggest that the first fortified town in what is now Dnipro was probably built in the mid-16th century.^[1][5] Archeologic foundings suggest that the town Samar, now a neighborhood in Dnipro's Samarskyi District, existed in 1524. Archaeologists of the Dnipro National University have discovered artifacts there dated around 1520s. According to historical findings on the current territory of the city's Amur-Nyzhnodniprovskyi District there was a village located there called Kamyanka that was founded in 1596.

In 1635, the Polish Government built the Kodak Fortress above the Dnieper Rapids at Kodaky (on the south-eastern outskirts of modern Dnipro), partly as a result of rivalry in the region between Poland, Turkey and Crimean Khanate, and partly to maintain control over Cossack activity (i.e. to suppress the Cossack raiders and to prevent peasants moving out of the area). On the night of 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.^[6]

The fort was rebuilt by French engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan for the Polish Government in 1638, and had a mercenary garrison.^[6] 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. The ruins of the Kodak are visible now. There is currently a project to restore it and create a tourist centre and park-museum.^[7]

Following the Treaty of Andrusovo, the lands of Zaporizhian Sich (around Kodak fortress) were under a condominium between the Russian Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rzeczpospolita relinquished its control over the area with signing of the 1686 Treaty of Perpetual Peace and, thus, handing over Zaporizhia to Russia.

In 1688 Zaporozhian Cossacks and Tatar forces unsuccessfully tried to destroy the Russian troops in the town's Bohorodytsia Fortress (built for the Russian Tsar) but ended up destroying the unprotected lower town only.^[1] Cossacks in 1711 forced the Russians troops out of the town under the Treaty of the Pruth; this time in an alliance with the Tatars and the Ottoman Empire.^[1] Two fortresses on territory of the future Ukrainian metropolis, Kodak Fortress and Bohorodytsia Fortress (on territory of Samar), were razed in accordance to the Russian treaty.

In the mid-1730s Russians troops returned to the Bohorodytsia Fortress.^[1]

The Zaporozhian village of Polovytsia was founded in the late-1760s, between the settlements of Stari (Old) and Novi (New) Kodaky. It was located at the present centre of the city to the West to district of Central Terminal and the Ozyorka farmers market.^[8]

Cossacks and the Russian army had fought against the Ottoman Empire for control of this area in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca ended this war in July 1774, and in May 1775 the Russian army destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, thus eliminating the political autonomy of Cossacks. In 1775, Prince Grigori Potemkin was appointed governor of Novorossiya, and after the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich, he started founding cities in the region and encouraging foreign settlers.

Establishment of Catherine's city

Prior to 1926 the city currently called Dnipro was known as Ekaterinoslav, which could be approximately rendered as "the glory of Catherine", with reference to Catherine the Great, who reigned as Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. (The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) connects city traditions with the name of Saint Catherine of Alexandria ( 287 to 305).

According to one account, the city was founded in 1787 (the official founding year was set to 1776 in 1976 in an effort to please the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev^[1]) as the administrative centre of Russia's newly re-established Azov Governorate (founded in 1775).

The original town of Yekaterinoslav was founded in 1777 by the Azov Governor (in office 1775–1781) on the orders of Grigory Potemkin, not in the current location, but at the confluence of the River Samara with the Kilchen River near Loshakivka, north of the Dnieper.^[9]

The city was named in honor of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great.^[9] By 1782 the city had a population of 2,194.^[9] However the site had been badly chosen - spring waters transformed the city into a bog.^[9] The settlement there was later renamed Novomoskovsk (today Novomoskovsk, Ukraine).

On 22 January 1784 Catherine the Great signed an Imperial Ukase stating the following, "the gubernatorial city under name of Yekaterinoslav to be by better convenience on the right bank of Dnieper near Kaidak" ("губернскому городу под названием Екатеринослав быть по лучшей удобности на правой стороне реки Днепр у Кайдака...").^[9] Construction started on the site of Zaporizhian sloboda Polovytsia that had existed at least since the 1740s.^[9] Here were the wintering estates of the Cossack officers Mykyta Korzh, Lazar Hloba, and others.^[9]

The ceremonial laying the foundation of Yekaterinoslav as the centre of the Yekaterinoslav Viceroyalty took place on 20 May 1787 on the hill where Zhovtneva Square is now.^[9] The population of Yekaterinoslav-Kil'chen were (according to some sources) transferred to the new site. Potemkin had extremely ambitious plans for the city. In drafting and construction of the city took part prominent Russian architects Ivan Starov, Vasily Stasov, Andreyan Zakharov.^[9]

The city's development started along Dnieper from two opposite ends divided by deep ravines.^[9] It was to be about in size, and included^[8] transfiguration Cathedral (the claim that it was intended as the largest in the world probably results from confusing Potemkin's reference to San Paulo-fuori-le-mura in Rome with St Peter's Basilica.^[10]); university (never built); botanical garden on Monastyrskyi Island and wide straight avenues through the city. In 1790 at the hilly part of the city was built the Potemkin's princely palace on draft of Ivan Starov.^[9]

The cathedral's foundation stone was laid by Empress Catherine II and Austrian Emperor Joseph II, during Catherine's Crimean journey on , which was heralded as the official date of founding the city. Nevertheless, the cathedral as originally designed was never to be built. The site for the Potemkin palace was bought from retired Cossack yesaul (colonel) Lazar Hloba, who owned much of the land near the city. Part of Lazar Hloba's gardens still exist and are now called Hloba Park.^[8]

A combination of yet another Russo-Turkish war that broke out later in 1787, bureaucratic procrastination, defective workmanship, and theft resulted in what was built being less than originally planned. Construction stopped after the death of Potemkin (1791) and of his sponsor, Empress Catherine (1796), who was succeeded by her son Emperor Paul I - known for his open antipathy to his mother's policies and undertakings. Plans were reconsidered and scaled back. The size of the cathedral was reduced, and construction finished only in 1835.

The origin of industrial centre

While into the late nineteenth the principal business of the town remained the processing of agricultural raw materials,^[9] there was an early state-sponsored effort to promote manufacture. In 1794 the government supported two factories: textile factory that was transferred from the town of Dubrovny Mogilev Governorate along with workers and serf-peasants and a silk-stockings factory that was brought from village of Kupavna near Moscow. In 1797 the textile factory employed 819 permanent workers, 378 of whom were women and 115 children.The silk stocking workers, of the majority were women, were serfs bought at an auction for 16,000 rubles. Conditions, as Potemkin himself was forced to admit, were harsh, with many of the operatives dying from malnutrition and exhaustion. ^[9]

From 1797 to 1802, while serving under the Emperor Paul I as the administrative centre of a centre of the Novorossiya Governorate, the settlement was officially known as Novorossiysk.^[9]

Despite the bridging of the Dnieper in 1796 and the growth of trade in the early 19th century, Ekaterinoslav remained small. 1832 saw the establishment of the small Zaslavsky iron-casting factory. the town's first metalurgical enterprise. of Zaslavsky.^[9] Industrialisation gathered a pace in the 1880s with the establishment of the first railway connections. Rail construction responded to the enterprise of two men: John Hughes, a Welsh businessman who built an iron works at what is now Donetsk (then Yuzovka) in 1869–72, and developed the Donetsk coal deposits;^[8] and the Russian geologist Alexander Pol, who in 1866 had discovered the Kryvyi Rih iron ore basin, Kryvbas, during archaeological research.^[8]

The Donetsk coal was necessary for smelting pig iron from the Kryvyi Rih ore, producing a need for a railway to connect Yozovka with Kryvyi Rih. Permission to build the railway was given in 1881, and it opened in 1884. The railway crossed the Dnieper at Ekaterinoslav. The city grew quickly; new suburbs appeared: Amur, Nyzhnodniprovsk and the factory areas developed. In 1897, Ekaterinoslav became the third city in the Russian Empire to have electric trams. The Higher Mining School opened in 1899, and by 1913 it had grown into the Mining Institute.^[8] Reaching 157,000 in 1904, the population had more than tripled.

In the widespread unrest that in 1905 followed defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the political life of the city was dominated by the revolutionary opposition and by the insurrectionary spirit of the nacent labor movement. The local czarist authorities were able to ride out the wave political protests and strikes, in part, by playing on division between Jewish workers who predominated as clerks and artisans in the city, and Russian workers employed in the large suburban factories. There was a wave of anti-Semitic attacks in which dozens of people were killed and hundreds wounded.^[8]

From 1902 to 1933, the historian of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Dmytro Yavornytsky, was Director of the Dnipro Museum, which was later named after him. Before his death in 1940, Yavornytsky wrote a History of the City of Ekaterinoslav, which lay in manuscript for many years. It was only published in 1989 as a result of the Gorbachev reforms and policy of Glasnost.

Ukrainian War of Independence and civil war

In June 1917, four months after the Russian February revolution, Ekaterinoslav was within the territory of the autonomous Ukrainian People's Republic proclaimed by Tsentralna Rada in Kyiv. Following their October Revolution, the Bolsheviks took power city and in January 1918 declared it part of a Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. This, however, they soon abandoned, conceding the region under the terms of the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the German-controlled Ukrainian State. After German and Austro-Hungarian forces withdrew west in November 1918, the city was variously occupied by the Directorate of the independent the Ukrainian People's Republic (the Petliurists), Denikin's Volunteer Army (the "Whites"), the anarchist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (the Makhnovshchina) and, from January 1920, by the Bolshevik Red Army.

The Soviet era

Stalin-era industrialisation

In 1922 the region was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR, a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. The city was renamed Dnipropetrovsk after the Communist leader of Ukraine Grigory Petrovsky in 1926.^[11]

In the 1930s the city figred prominently in Stalin's Five-Year Plans for industrialisation. Already in 1932, Dnipropetrovsk regional metallurgical plants produced 20 per cent of the entire cast iron and 25 per cent of the steel manufactured in the Ukrainian SSR and by the end of the thirties the Dnipropetrovsk region became the most urbanised of Soviet Ukraine with more than 2,273,000 people living in the region and over half a million in the city proper. Dnipropetrovsk also became an important cultural and educational centre with ten colleges and State University.

The surrounding countryside was devastated by the policy of forced collectivisation and grain seizures. Peasants had died en masse during the Holodomor of 1932–33.

Nazi occupation

Dnipropetrovsk was under Nazi occupation from 26 August 1941 to 25 October 1943 and was administered as part of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Holocaust in Dnipropetrovsk reduced the city's remaining Jewish population, estimates for which range from 55,000 to 30,000, to just 702. In just two days, 13–14 October 1941, the Germans killed 15,000.

In a series of camps in the city (Stammlager 348), the occupiers are estimated to have killed upwards of 30,000 Soviet POWs.

Post-war closed city

As early as July 1944, the State Committee of Defence in Moscow decided to build a large military machine-building factory in Dnipropetrovsk on the location of the pre-war aircraft plant. In December 1945, thousands of German prisoners of war began construction and built the first sections and shops in the new factory. This was the foundation of the Dnipropetrovsk Automobile Factory.

Joseph Stalin suggested special secret training for highly qualified engineers and scientists to become rocket construction specialists.

In 1954 the administration of this automobile factory opened a secret design office with the name "Southern" (konstruktorskoe biuro Yuzhnoe – in Russian) to construct military missiles and rocket engines. Hundreds of talented physicists, engineers and machine designers moved from Moscow and other large cities in the Soviet Union to Dnipropetrovsk to join this "Southern" design office. In 1965, the secret Plant No. 586 was transferred to the Ministry of General Machine-Building of the USSR. The next year this plant officially changed its name to "the Southern Machine-building Factory" (Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel'nyi zavod) or in abbreviated Russian, simply Yuzhmash.

The first "General Constructor" and head of the "Southern" design office was Mikhail Yangel, a prominent scientist and outstanding designer of space rockets, who managed not only the design office, but the entire factory from 1954 to 1971. Yangel designed the first powerful rockets and space military equipment for the Soviet Ministry of Defence.

In 1951 the Southern Machine-building Factory began manufacturing and testing new military rockets for the battlefield. The range of these first missiles was only . By 1959 Soviet scientists and engineers developed new technology, and as a result, the "Southern" design office (KBYu – as abbreviated in Russian) started a new machine-building project making ballistic missiles. Under the leadership of Yangel, KBYu produced more powerful rocket engines with increased range.

During the 1960s, these powerful rocket engines were used as launch vehicles for the first Soviet space ships. During Makarov's directorship, Yuzhmash designed and manufactured four generations of missile complexes of different types. These included space launch vehicles Kosmos, Tsyklon-2, Tsyklon-3 and Zenit. Under the leadership of Yangel's successor, V. Utkin, the KBYu created a unique space-rocket system called Energia-Buran.

Yuzhmash engineers manufactured 400 technical devices that were launched in artificial satellites (Sputniks). For the first time in the world space industry, the Dnipropetrovsk missile plant organised the serial production of space Sputniks. By the 1980s, this plant manufactured 67 different types of space ships, 12 space research complexes and four defence space rocket systems.

These systems were used not only for purely military purposes by the Ministry of Defence, but also for space research, for global radio and television networks, and for ecological monitoring. Yuzhmash initiated and sponsored the international space program of socialist countries, called Interkosmos.

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, KBYu had 9 regular and corresponding members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, 33 full professors and 290 scientists holding a PhD. They awarded scientific degrees and presided over a prestigious graduate school at KBYu, which attracted talented students of physics from all over the USSR. More than 50,000 people worked at Yuzhmash.

At the end of the 1950s, Yuzhmash became the main Soviet design and manufacturing centre for different types of missile complexes. The Soviet Ministry of Defence included Yuzhmash in its strategic plans. The military rocket systems manufactured in Dnipropetrovsk became the major component of the newly born Soviet Missile Forces of Strategic Purpose.

According to contemporaries, Yuzhmash was a separate entity inside the Soviet state. After a long period of competition with the Moscow centre of rocket construction of V. Chelomei (a successor of Koroliov), Yuzhmash rocket designs won in 1969. Since that time leaders of the Soviet military industrial complex preferred Yuzhmash rocket models. By the end of the 1970s, this plant became the major centre for designing, constructing, manufacturing, testing and deploying strategic and space missile complexes in the Soviet Union. The general designer and director of Yuzhmash supervised the work of numerous research institutes, design centres and factories all over the Soviet Union from Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv, to Voronezh and Yerevan. The Soviet state provided billions of Soviet rubles to finance Yuzhmash projects.

Officially, Yuzhmash manufactured agricultural tractors and special kitchen equipment for everyday needs, such as mincing-machines or juicers for civilian Soviet households. In official reports for the general audience there was no information about the production of rockets or spaceships. However, hundreds of thousands of workers and engineers in the city of Dnipropetrovsk worked in this plant and members of their families (up to 60% of the city population) knew about the "real production" of Yuzhmash.

This missile plant became a significant factor in the arms race of the Cold War. This is why the Soviet government approved of the KGB's secrecy about Yuzhmash and its products. According to the Soviet government's decision, the city of Dnipropetrovsk was officially closed to foreign visitors in 1959. No citizen of a foreign country (even of the socialist ones) was allowed to visit the city or district of Dnipropetrovsk. After the late 1950s ordinary Soviet people called Dnipropetrovsk "the rocket closed city." Only during perestroika was Dnipropetrovsk opened to foreigners again in 1987.

In Independent Ukraine

In June 1990, the women's department of Dnipropetrovsk preliminary prison was destroyed in prison riots. In the ten years that followed, women under investigation (i.e. not convicted) in Dnipropetrovsk oblast were either held in Preliminary Prison 4 in Kryvyi Rih or in "detention blocks" in Dnipropetrovsk. This contravened Ukrainian Law "On preliminary incarceration". Journeys from Kryviy Rih took up to six hours in special railway carriages with grated windows. Some prisoners had to do this 14 or 15 times. After complaints by the ombudsman (Nina Karpacheva) the head of the State prison department of Ukraine (Vladimir Levochkin) arranged that finances were given for the provision of women's cells in Dnipropetrovsk Preliminary Prison, making the lives of the 15,000 unconvicted women-detainees easier from August 2000.

In 2005, the most powerful representative of the "Dnipropetrovsk Faction" in Ukrainian politics was Leonid Kuchma, the former President of Ukraine and former senior manager of Yuzhmash.

In June and July 2007, Dnipropetrovsk experienced a wave of random serial killings that were dubbed by the media as the work of the "Dnipropetrovsk maniacs". In February 2009, three youths were sentenced for their part in 21 murders, and numerous other attacks and robberies.

On 27 April 2012, four bombs exploded near four tram stations in Dnipropetrovsk, injuring 26 people.

During the 2014 Euromaidan regional state administration occupations protests against President Viktor Yanukovych were also held in Dnipropetrovsk. On 26 January, 3,000 anti-Yanukovych activists attempted to capture the local regional state administration building, but failed. This was mirrored by instances of rioting and the beating up of anti-Yanukovych protesters. Dnipropetrovsk Governor Kolesnikov called the anti-Yanukovych protesters 'extreme radical thugs from other regions'.

Two days later about 2,000 public sector employees called an indefinite rally in support of the Yanukovych government. Meanwhile, the government building was reinforced with barbed wire.^[12] On 19 February 2014 there was an anti-Yanukovych picket near the Regional State Administration. On 22 February 2014 after another anti-Yanukovych picket near the Regional State Administration Dnipropetrovsk Mayor Ivan Kulichenko left Yanukovych's Party of Regions "for peace in the city".^[13]

Simultaneously the Dnipropetrovsk City Council vowed to supports "the preservation of Ukraine as a single and indivisible state", although some members called for separatism and for federalization of Ukraine.^[13] The City Council also decided to rename city's Lenin Square into "Heroes of Independence Square".^[13] In the Regional State Administration building protesters dismantled Viktor Yanukovych portrait.^[13] 22 February 2014 was also the day that Yanukovych was ousted out of office, after violent events in Kyiv.

According to media reports, Dnipropetrovsk was relatively quiet during the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, with pro-Russian Federation protestors outnumbered by those opposing outside intervention. In March 2014 the city's Lenin Square was renamed "Heroes of Independence Square" in honor of the people killed during Euromaidan.^[14] The statue of Lenin on the square was removed.^[14] In June 2014 another Lenin monument was removed and replaced by a monument to the Ukrainian military fighting the War in Donbass.

In order to comply with the 2015 decommunization law the city was renamed Dnipro in May 2016, after the river that flows through the city.^[4][15] By summer 2016 not only the city was renamed, but also more than 350 streets, alleys, driveways, squares and parks in it.^[16] This was 12 percent of all of the city's toponymies.^[16] Also five of the eight urban districts (of the city) received new names.

Until 18 July 2020, Dnipro was incorporated as a city of oblast significance, the centre of Dnipro municipality and extraterritorial administrative centre of Dnipro Raion. The municipality was abolished in July 2020 as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to seven. The area of Dnipro Municipality was merged into Dnipro Raion.

Russian invasion 2022

In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine initiated by the Russian Federation on 24 February 2022, and with developing military fronts to the north, east and south, Dnipro has become a logistical hub for humanitarian aid and a reception point for people fleeing the war. Roughly equidistant from most of the war's major battlegrounds — Donetsk, Mariupol, Kherson and Kharkiv are all within — the city's location is also proving critical for supplying the Ukrainian defence effort. At the same time, its control of Dnieper River crossing and the opportunity it would provide cut off Ukrainian forces in the Donbas makes the city a high-value target for the Russians.^[17]

Dnipro is reported as the only city in Ukraine where a volunteer formation has been created under direct City Council control. It is called the "Dnieper Guard" (Варти Дніпра, Varty Dnipra). Mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov dismisses suggestions that the group is a "private army" of Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky has helped with some equipment purchases, but the force of performs defence and law and order functions under the leadership of the national police.

The Russians first hit Dnipro on 11 March. According to state emergency services three air strikes close to a kindergarten and an apartment building killed at least one person. On 15 March, Russian missiles hit the airport, destroying the runway and damaging the terminal. In the early hours of 6 April, an air strike destroyed an oil depot. On 10 April, a Ukrainian government spokesperson said that the airport in Dnipro had been "completely destroyed" as the result of a Russian attack.

2022 July Dnipro missile strike killed four people.

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