Ukrainian Place Names

As you are likely already aware, it is best practice to spell Ukrainian place names using transliterations based on the Ukrainian language rather than the Russian language, e.g. it's Kyiv not Kiev. Ukraine is a large country (233,062 square miles = 603,628 square kilometers), so there are too many place names to list them all. But here we'll try to have the most common and/or most newsworthy ones.

Because there isn't a perfect one-to-one correspondence between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, you will occasionally encounter swaps of i/y/j - for example, President Zelenskyy's name (Ukrainian Зеленський) could plausibly be transliterated as Zelenskyy, Zelenskyi, Zeleneskyj. In this article we generally adhere to the following convention: Ukrainian і = Russian и = Latin i; Ukrainian и = Russian ы = Latin y; Ukrainian й = Russian й = Latin i. The scientific transliteration of й as j is quite rare in the media; it is most often rendered as i, e.g. Кривий Ріг is usually spelled Kryvyi Rih, but sometimes rendered as y, as in Zelenskyy's name.

Additionally, where appropriate, we will omit certain symbols or letters to better match what is likely to be found in media. For example, the soft sign in Зеленський could be rendered as an apostrophe (viz. Zelens'kyy) but this is rarely seen. Another example is the y-glide in soft vowels is sometimes ommitted, e.g. Kyiv (Київ) could be Kyjiv or Kyiiv, but this too is rarely seen.

Another possible source of confusion is g/h. Ukrainian, along with some other slavic languages like Czech, Slovak, and Belarusian, change the common slavic g to h. In written Ukrainian, the spelling of common slavic is preserved (as г). Ukrainian also has a g sound, for which they developed a unique letter ґ (found only in Ukrainian and outlawed by the soviets from 1933 to 1990), but it is rather uncommon. This article uses h to indicate pronunciation (and commonality with Czech, Slovak, Belarusian, etc), but you will sometimes come across written g, e.g. Чернігів could be rendered as Chernihiv or Chernigiv but is always pronounced as the former and never the latter.

Additional information
Please send any comments, corrections, additions, etc to @ronnystickshift on Twitter.