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 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.
| Correct spelling | Ukrainian Cyrillic | Wrong spelling | Russian Cyrillic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kyiv | Київ | Kiev | Киев |
| Kharkiv | Харків | Kharkov | Харьков |
| Odesa | Одеса | Odessa | Одесса |
| Donbas | Донбас | Donbass | Донбасс |
| Zaporizhzhia | Запоріжжя | Zaporozhye | Запорожье |
| Luhansk | Луганськ | Lugansk | Луганск |
| Kryvyi Rih | Кривий Ріг | Krivoy Rog | Кривой Рог |
| Antonivskyi Bridge | Антонівский міст | Antonovskiy Bridge | Антоновский мост |
