Kharkiv Харків
City
Ukrainian transcription(s)
• National, ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN	Kharkiv
• Scholarly	Charkiv
Clockwise from top: Assumption Cathedral, Kharkiv railway station, National University of Kharkiv, Kharkiv city council
Flag Coat of arms Brandmark
Nickname:  Smart City
Interactive map of Kharkiv
Kharkiv Show map of Ukraine Kharkiv Show map of Kharkiv Oblast Kharkiv Show map of Europe
Coordinates: 49°59′33″N 36°13′52″E / 49.99250°N 36.23111°E / 49.99250; 36.23111
Country	Ukraine
Oblast	Kharkiv Oblast
Raion	Kharkiv Raion
Hromada	Kharkiv urban hromada
Founded	1654[1]
Districts	List of 9[2] Shevchenkivskyi Raion Novobavarskyi Raion Kyivskyi Raion Slobidskyi Raion Kholodnohirskyi Raion Saltivskyi Raion Nemyshlianskyi Raion Industrialnyi Raion Osnovianskyi Raion
Government
• Mayor	Ihor Terekhov[3] (Kernes Bloc — Successful Kharkiv[4])
Area
• City	350 km2 (140 sq mi)
• Metro	3,223 km2 (1,244 sq mi)
Elevation	152 m (499 ft)
Population  (2022)
• City	1,421,125
• Rank	2nd in Ukraine
• Density	4,500/km2 (12,000/sq mi)
• Metro	1,729,049[5]
Demonym	Kharkivite[6]
Time zone	UTC+2 (EET)
• Summer (DST)	UTC+3 (EEST)
Postal code	61001–61499
Licence plate	AX, KX, ХА (old), 21 (old)
Sister cities	Albuquerque, Bologna, Cincinnati, Kaunas, Lille, Nuremberg, Poznań, Tianjin, Jinan, Kutaisi, Varna, Rishon LeZion, Brno, Daugavpils
Website	www.city.kharkiv.ua

Kharkiv (Ukrainian: Харків, IPA: [ˈxɑrkiu̯] ^ⓘ), also known as Kharkov (Russian: Харькoв, IPA: [ˈxarʲkəf] ^ⓘ), is the second-largest city in Ukraine.^[7] Located in the northeast of the country, it is the largest city of the historic region of Sloboda Ukraine. Kharkiv is the administrative centre of Kharkiv Oblast and of the surrounding Kharkiv Raion. It has a population of 1,421,125 (2022 estimate).^[8]

Kharkiv was founded in 1654 as a fortress, and grew to become a major centre of industry, trade, and Ukrainian culture in Sloboda Ukraine in the composition Russian Empire. At the beginning of the 20th century, the city had a predominantly Ukrainian and Russian population, but as industrial expansion drew in further labor from the distressed countryside, and as the Soviet Union moderated previous restrictions on Ukrainian cultural expression, Ukrainians became the largest ethnic group in the city by the eve of World War II. From December 1919 to January 1934, Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Kharkiv is a major cultural, scientific, educational, transport and industrial centre of Ukraine, with numerous museums, theatres and libraries, including the Annunciation and Dormition cathedrals, the Derzhprom building in Freedom Square, and the National University of Kharkiv. Industry plays a significant role in Kharkiv's economy, specialised primarily in machinery and electronics. There are hundreds of industrial facilities throughout the city, including the Morozov Design Bureau, the Malyshev Factory, Khartron, Turboatom, and Antonov.

In March and April 2014, security forces and counter-demonstrators defeated efforts by Russian-backed separatists to seize control of the city and regional administration. Kharkiv was a major target for Russian forces in the eastern Ukraine campaign during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine before they were pushed back to the Russia-Ukraine border. The city remains under intermittent Russian fire, with reports that almost a quarter of the city was destroyed by April 2024.^[9][10]

History

Early history

The earliest historical references to the region are to Scythian and Sarmatian settlement in the 2nd century BCE. Between the 2nd to the 6th centuries CE there is evidence of Chernyakhov culture, a multiethnic mix of the Geto-Dacian, Sarmatian, and Gothic populations. ^[11] In the 8th to 10th centuries the Khazar fortress of Verkhneye Saltovo stood about 25 miles (40 km) east of the modern city, near Staryi Saltiv.^[12] During the 12th century, the area was part of the territory of the Cumans, and then from the mid 13th century of the Mongol/Tartar Golden Horde.

By the early 17th century, the area was a contested frontier region with renegade populations that had begun to organise in Cossack formations and communities defined by a common determination to resist both Tatar slavery, and Polish-Lithuanian and Russian serfdom. Mid-century, the Khmelnytsky Uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth saw the brief establishment of an independent Cossack Hetmanate.^[13]

Kharkiv Fortress

In 1654, in the midst of this period of turmoil for Right-bank Ukraine, groups of people came onto the banks of Lopan and Kharkiv rivers where they resurrected and fortified an abandoned settlement.^[14] There is a folk etymology that connects the name of both the settlement and the river to a legendary Cossack founder named Kharko^[15] (a diminutive form of the name Chariton, Ukrainian: Харитон, romanized: Kharyton,^[1] or Zechariah, Ukrainian: Захарій, romanized: Zakharii).^[16] But the river's name is attested earlier than the foundation of the fortress.^[17]

The settlement reluctantly accepted the protection and authority of a Russian voivode from Chuhuiv 40 kilometres (25 mi) to the east. The first appointed voivode from Moscow was Voyin Selifontov in 1656, who began to build a local ostrog (fort). In 1658, a new voivode, Ivan Ofrosimov, commanded the locals to kiss the cross in a demonstration of loyalty to Tsar Alexis. Led by their otaman Ivan Kryvoshlyk, they refused. However, with the election of a new otaman, Tymish Lavrynov, relations appear to have been repaired, the Tsar in Moscow granting the community's request (signed by the deans of the new Assumption Cathedral and parish churches of Annunciation and Trinity) to establish a local market.^[14]

At that time the population of Kharkiv was just over 1000, half of whom were local Cossacks. Selifontov had brought with him a Moscow garrison of only 70 soldiers.^[14] Defence rested with a local Sloboda Cossack regiment under the jurisdiction of the Razryad Prikaz, a military agency commanded from Belgorod.^[14]

The original walls of Kharkiv enclosed today's streets: vulytsia Kvitky-Osnovianenko, Constitution Square, Rose Luxemburg Square, Proletarian Square, and Cathedral Descent.^[14] There were 10 towers of which the tallest, Vestovska, was some 16 metres (52 ft) high. In 1689 the fortress was expanded to include the Intercession Cathedral and Monastery, which became a seat of a local church hierarch, the Protopope.^[14]

Russian Empire

Administrative reforms led to Kharkiv being governed from 1708 from Kyiv,^[18] and from 1727 from Belgorod. In 1765 Kharkiv was established as the seat of a separate Sloboda Ukraine Governorate.^[19]

Kharkiv University was established in 1805 in the Palace of Governorate-General.^[14] Alexander Mikolajewicz Mickiewicz, brother of the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, was a professor of law in the university, while another celebrity, Goethe, searched for instructors for the school.^[14] One of its later graduates was In Ivan Franko, to whom it awarded a doctorate in Russian linguistics in 1906.^[14][20]

The streets were first cobbled in the city centre in 1830.^[21] In 1844 the 90 metres (300 ft) tall Alexander Bell Tower, commemorating the victory over Napoleon I in 1812, was built next to the first Assumption Cathedral (later to be transformed by the Soviet authorities into a radio tower). A system of running water was established in 1870.^[14]

In the course of the 19th century, although predominantly Russian speaking, Kharkiv became a centre of Ukrainian culture.^[22] The first Ukrainian newspaper was published in the city in 1812. Soon after the Crimean War, in 1860–61, a hromada was established in the city, one of a network of secret societies that laid the groundwork for the appearance of a Ukrainian national movement. Its most prominent member was the philosopher, linguist and pan-slavist activist Oleksandr Potebnia. Members of a student hromada in the city included the future national leaders Borys Martos and Dmytro Antonovych,^[22] and reputedly were the first to employ the slogan "Glory to Ukraine!" and its response "Glory on all of earth!".^[23]

In 1900, the student hromada founded the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), which sought to unite all Ukrainian national elements, including the growing number of socialists.^[24] Following the revolutionary events 1905 in which Kharkiv distinguished itself by avoiding a reactionary pogrom against its Jewish population,^[25] the RUP in Kharkiv, Poltava, Kyiv, Nizhyn, Lubny, and Yekaterinodar repudiated the more extreme elements of Ukrainian nationalism. Adopting the Erfurt Program of German Social Democracy, they restyled themselves the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party (USDLP). This was to remain independent of, and opposed by, the Bolshevik faction of the Russian SDLP.^[26][27]

After the February Revolution of 1917, the USDLP was the main party in the first Ukrainian government, the General Secretariat of Ukraine. The Tsentralna Rada (central council) of Ukrainian parties in Kyiv authorised the Secretariat to negoitate national autonomy with the Russian Provisional Government. In the succeeding months, as wartime conditions deteriorated, the USDLP lost support in Kharkiv and elsewhere to the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) which organised both in peasant communities and in disaffected military units.^[27]

Soviet era

Capital of Soviet Ukraine

In the Russian Constituent Assembly election held in November 1917, the Bolsheviks who had seized power in Petrograd and Moscow received just 10.5 percent of the vote in the Governorate, compared to 73 percent for a bloc of Russian and Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. Commanding worker, rather than peasant, votes, within the city itself the Bolsheviks won a plurality.^[28]

When in Petrograd Lenin's Council of People's Commissars disbanded the Constituent Assembly after its first sitting, the Tsentralna Rada in Kyiv proclaimed the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR).^[1] Bolsheviks withdrew from Tsentralna Rada and formed their own Rada (national council) in Kharkiv.^[29][30] By February 1918 their forces had captured much of Ukraine.^[31]

They made Kharkiv the capital of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.^[32] Six weeks later, under the treaty terms agreed with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, they abandoned the city and ceded the territory to the German-occupied Ukrainian State.^[33]

After the German withdrawal, the Red Army returned but, in June 1919, withdrew again before the advancing forces of Anton Denikin's White movement Volunteer.^[34] By December 1919 Soviet authority was restored.^[35] The Bolsheviks established Kharkiv as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and, in 1922, this was formally incorporated as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union.^[36]

A number of prestige construction projects in new officially-approved Constructivist style were completed,^[37] among them Derzhprom (Palace of Industry) then the tallest building in the Soviet Union (and the second tallest in Europe),^[38] the Red Army Building, the Ukrainian Polytechnic Institute of Distance Learning (UZPI), the City Council building, with its massive asymmetric tower, and the central department store that was opened on the 15th Anniversary of the October Revolution.^[14] As new buildings were going up, many of city's historic architectural monuments were being torn down. These included most of the baroque churches: Saint Nicholas's Cathedral of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church, the Church of the Myrrhophores, Saint Demetrius's Church, and the Cossack fortified Church of the Nativity.^[39]

Under Stalin's First Five Year Plan, the city underwent intensified industrialisation, led by a number of national projects. Chief among these were the Kharkiv Tractor Factory (HTZ), described by Stalin as "a steel bastion of the collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukraine",^[40] and the Malyshev Factory, an enlargement of the old Kharkiv Locomotive Factory, which at its height employed 60,000 workers in the production of heavy equipment.^[41] By 1937 the output of Kharkiv's industries was reported as being 35 times greater than in 1913.^[39]

Since turn of the century, the influx of new workers from the countryside changed the ethnic composition of Kharkiv. According to census returns, by 1939 the Russian share of the population had fallen from almost two thirds to one third, while the Ukrainian share rose from a quarter to almost half. The Jewish population rose from under 6 percent of the total, to over 15 percent^[42][43] (sustaining a Hebrew secondary school, a popular Jewish university and extensive publication in Yiddish and Hebrew).^[44]

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian SSR promoted the use of the Ukrainian language, mandating it for all schools. In practice the share of secondary schools teaching in the Ukrainian language remained lower than the ethnic Ukrainian share of the Kharkiv Oblast's population.^[45] The Ukrainization policy was reversed, with the prosecution in Kharkiv in 1930 of the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine. Hundreds of Ukrainian intellectuals were arrested and deported.^[46]

In 1932 and 1933, the combination of grain seizures and the forced collectivisation of peasant holdings created famine conditions, the Holodomor, driving people off the land and into Kharkiv, and other cities, in search of food.^[47][48] Eye-witness accounts by westerners—among them those of American Communist Fred Beal employed in the Kharkiv Tractor Factory^[49] —were cited in the international press but, until the era of Glasnost were consistently denounced in the Soviet Union as fabrications.^[50][51][52]

In 1934 hundreds of Ukrainian writers, intellectuals and cultural workers were arrested and executed in the attempt to eradicate all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. The purges continued into 1938. Blind Ukrainian street musicians Kobzars were also rounded up in Kharkiv and murdered by the NKVD.^[53] Confident in his control over Ukraine, in January 1934 Stalin had the capital of the Ukrainian SSR moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv.^[54]

During April and May 1940 about 3,900 Polish prisoners of Starobilsk camp were executed in the Kharkiv NKVD building, later secretly buried on the grounds of an NKVD pansionat in Piatykhatky forest (part of the Katyn massacre) on the outskirts of Kharkiv.^[55][56] The site also contains the numerous bodies of Ukrainian cultural workers who were arrested and shot in the 1937–38 Stalinist purges.

German occupation

During World War II, Kharkiv was the focus of major battles. The city was captured by Nazi Germany on 24 October 1941.^[57][58] A disastrous Red Army offensive failed to recover the city in May 1942.^[59][60] It was retaken (Operation Star) on 16 February 1943, but lost again to the Germans on 15 March 1943. 23 August 1943 saw a final liberation.^[61]

On the eve of the occupation, Kharkiv's prewar population of 700,000 had been doubled by the influx of refugees.^[62] What remained of the pre-war Jewish population of 130,000, were slated by the Germans for "special treatment": between December 1941 and January 1942, they massacred and buried an estimated 15,000 Jews in a ravine outside of town named Drobytsky Yar.^[63] Over their 22 months occupation they executed a further 30,000 residents, among them suspected Soviet partisans and, after a brief period of toleration, Ukrainian nationalists. 80,000 people died of hunger, cold and disease. 60,000 were forcibly transported to Germany as slave workers (Ostarbeiter).^[64][39] Among these was Boris Romanchenko. The 96-year old survivor of forced labor at the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen Belsen concentration camps was killed when Russian fire hit his apartment bloc on 18 March 2022.^[65][66]

By the time of Kharkiv's liberation in August 1943, the surviving population had been reduced to under 200,000.^[62] Seventy percent of the city had been destroyed.^[61] According to a New York Time's piece, "The city was more battered than perhaps any other in the Soviet Union save Stalingrad."^[67]

Post-World War II

Before the occupation, Kharkiv's tank industries had been evacuated to the Urals with all their equipment, and became the heart of Red Army's tank programs (particularly, producing the T-34 tank earlier designed in Kharkiv). These enterprises returned to Kharkiv after the war, and became central elements of the post-war Soviet military industrial complex.^[64] Houses and factories were rebuilt, and much of the city's center was reconstructed in the style of Stalinist Classicism.^[14] Kharkiv's Jewish community revived after World War II: by 1959 there were 84,000 Jews living in the city. However, Soviet anti-Zionism restricted expressions of Jewish religion and culture, and was sustained until the final Gorbachev years (the confiscated Kharkiv Choral Synagogue reopened as a synagogue in 1990).^[44]

In the Brezhnev-era, Kharkiv was promoted as a "model Soviet city". Propaganda made much of its “youthfulness”, a designation broadly used to suggest the relative absence in the city of "material and spiritual relics" from the pre-revolutionary era, and its commitment to the new frontiers of Soviet industry and science. The city's machine-and-weapons building prowess was attributed to a forward-looking collaboration between its large-scale industrial enterprises and new research institutes and laboratories.^[68]

The last Communist Party chief of Ukraine, Vladimir Ivashko, appointed in 1989, trained as a mining engineer and served as a party functionary in Kharkiv.^[69] He led the Communists to victory in Kharkiv and across the country in the parliamentary election held in the Ukrainian SSR in March 1990.^[70] The election was relatively free, but occurred well before organised political parties had time to form, and did not arrest the decline in the CPSU's legitimacy.^[71] This was accelerated by the intra-party coup attempt against President Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms on August 18, 1991, during which Ivashko temporarily replaced Gorbachev as CPSU General Secretary.^[72]

The National University of Kharkiv was at the forefront of democratic agitation. In October 1991, a call from Kyiv for an all-Ukrainian university strike to protest Gorbachev's new Union Treaty and to call for new multi-party elections was met with a rally at the entrance to the university attended not only by students and university teachers, but also by a range of public and cultural figures.^[73] The protests—the so-called Revolution on Granite^[74]—ended on October 17 with a resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR promising further democratic reform. In the event, the only demand fulfilled was the removal of the Communist Prime Minister.^[75]

Independent Ukraine

In the 1 December 1991 Referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence, on a turnout of 76 percent 86 percent of the Kharkiv Oblast approved separate Ukrainian statehood.^[76]

During the 1990s post-Soviet aliyah, many Jews from Kharkiv emigrated to Israel or to Western countries.^[77] The city's Jewish population, 62,800 in 1970,^[44] dropped to 50,000 by the end of the century.^[78]

The collapse of the Soviet Union disrupted, but did not sever, the ties that bound Kharkiv heavy's industries to the integrated Soviet market and supply chains, and did not diminish dependency on Russian oil, minerals, and gas.^[79] In Kharkiv and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, the limited prospects for securing new economic partners in the West, and concern for the rights of Russian-speakers in the new national state, combined to promote the interests of political parties and candidates emphasising understanding and cooperation with the Russian Federation. In the new century, these were represented by the Party of Regions and by the presidential ambitions of Victor Yanukovych,^[80] which in Kharkiv triumphed in the city council elections of 2006, in the parliamentary elections of 2007 and in the presidential elections of 2010.^[81]

Although never attaining the level of protest witnessed in Kyiv and in communities further west, following the disputed 2012 Parliamentary elections public opposition to President Yanukovych and his party surfaced in Kharkiv amid accusations of systematic corruption and of sabotaging prospects for new ties to the European Union.^[82]

2014 pro-Russian unrest

The Euromaidan protests in the winter of 2013–2014 against then president Viktor Yanukovych consisted of daily gatherings of about 200 protestors near the statue of Taras Shevchenko and were predominantly peaceful.^[83] Disappointed at the turnout, an activist at Kharkiv University suggested that his fellow students "proved to be as much of an inert, grey and cowed mass as Kharkiv’s ‘biudzhetniki’ " (those whose income derives from the state budget, mostly public servants).^[84] But Pro-Yanukovych demonstrations, held near the statue of Lenin in Freedom (previously Dzerzhinsky) Square, were similarly small.^[83]

In the wake Yanukovych's ouster in February, there were attempts in Kharkiv to follow the example of separatists in neighbouring Donbas.^[85] On 2 March 2014, a Russian "tourist" from Moscow replaced the Ukrainian flag with a Russian flag on the Kharkiv Regional State Administration Building.^[86] On 6 April 2014 pro-Russian protestors occupied the building and unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the "Kharkiv People's Republic".^[83][87] Doubts arose about their local origin as they had initially targeted the city's Opera and Ballet Theatre before recognising their mistake.^[88]

Kharkiv's mayor, Hennadiy "Gepa" Kernes, elected in 2010 as the nominee of the Party of Regions, was placed under house arrest. Claiming to have been "prisoner of Yanukovych's system",^[89] he now declared his loyalty to acting President Oleksandr Turchynov.^[83] In a televised address on April 7, Turchynov had announced that "a second wave of the Russian Federation's special operation against Ukraine started" with the "goal of destabilising the situation in the country, toppling Ukrainian authorities, disrupting the elections, and tearing our country apart".^[90] Kernes persuaded the police to storm the regional administration building and push out the separatists. He was allowed to return to his mayoral duties.^[91]

Police action against the separatists was reinforced by a special forces unit from Vinnytsia directed by Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Stepan Poltorak the acting commander of the Ukrainian Internal Forces.^[83][92]

On 13 April, some pro-Russian protesters again made it inside the Kharkiv regional state administration building, but were quickly evicted.^[92][93][94] Violent clashes resulted in the severe beating of at least 50 pro-Ukrainian protesters in attacks by pro-Russian protesters.^[93][94]

On 28 April, Kernes was shot by a sniper,^[95] a victim, commentators suggested, of his former pro-Russian allies.^[91]

Relatively peaceful demonstrations continued to be held, with "pro-Russian" rallies gradually diminishing and "pro-Ukrainian unity" demonstrations growing in numbers.^[96][97][98] On 28 September, activists dismantled Ukraine's largest monument to Lenin at a pro-Ukrainian rally in the central square.^[99] Polls conducted from September to December 2014 found little support in Kharkiv for joining Russia.^[100][101]

From early November until mid-December, Kharkiv was struck by seven non-lethal bomb blasts. Targets of these attacks included a rock pub known for raising money for Ukrainian forces, a hospital for Ukrainian forces, a military recruiting centre, and a National Guard base.^[102] According to SBU investigator Vasyliy Vovk, Russian covert forces were behind the attacks, and had intended to destabilise the otherwise calm city of Kharkiv.^[103] On 8 January 2015 five men wearing balaclavas broke into an office of Station Kharkiv, a volunteer group aiding refugees from Donbas.^[104] On 22 February an improvised explosive device killed four people and wounded nine during a march commemorating the Euromaidan victims.^[83] The authorities launched an 'anti-terrorist operation'.^[105] Further bombings targeted army fuel tanks, an unoccupied passenger train and a Ukrainian flag in the city centre.^[106]

On 23 September 2015, 200 people in balaclavas and camouflage picketed the house of former governor Mykhailo Dobkin, and then went to Kharkiv town hall, where they tried to force their way through the police cordon. At least one tear gas grenade was used. The rioters asked the mayor, Hennadiy Kernes, a supporter of the president, to come out.^[107][108] Following recovery from his wounds, Kernes had been re-elected mayor, and was so again in 2020. He died of COVID-19 related complication in December 2020.^[109][110] He was succeeded by Ihor Terekhov of the "Kernes Bloc — Successful Kharkiv".^[3][4]

After the Euromaidan events and Russian actions in the Crimea and Donbas ruptured relations with Moscow, the Kharkiv region experienced a sharp fall in output and employment. Once a hub of cross border trade, Kharkiv was turned into a border fortress. A reorientation to new international markets, increased defense contracts (after Kyiv, the region contains the second-largest number of military-related enterprises) and export growth in the economy's services sector helped fuel a recovery, but people's incomes did not return to pre-2014 levels.^[111]

By 2018 Kharkiv officially has the lowest unemployment rate in Ukraine, 6 percent. But in part this reflected labor shortages caused by the steady outflow of young and skilled workers to Poland and other European countries.^[111]

Until 18 July 2020, Kharkiv was incorporated as a city of oblast significance and served as the administrative center of Kharkiv Raion though it did not belong to the raion. In July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Kharkiv Oblast to seven, the city of Kharkiv was merged into Kharkiv Raion.^[112][113]

2022 Russian invasion

During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv was the site of heavy fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian forces.^[114] On 27 February, the governor of Kharkiv Oblast Oleh Synyehubov claimed that Russian troops were repelled from Kharkiv.^[115]

According to a 28 February 2022, report from Agroportal 24h, the Kharkiv Tractor Plant (KhTZ), in the south east of the city, was destroyed and “engulfed in fire” by “massive shelling” from Russian forces.^[116] Video purported to record explosions and fire at the plant on 25 and 27 February 2022.^[117][118] UNESCO has confirmed that in the first three weeks of bombardment the city experienced the loss or damage of at least 27 major historical buildings.^[119]

On 4 March 2022, Human Rights Watch reported that on the fourth day of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, 28 February 2022, Federation forces used cluster munitions in the KhTZ , the Moskovskyi and Shevchenkivskyi districts of the city. The rights group—which noted the "inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and their foreseeable effects on civilians"—based its assessment on interviews and an analysis of 40 videos and photographs.^[120] In March 2022, during the Battle of Kharkiv, the city was designated as a Hero City of Ukraine.^[121]

In May 2022, Ukrainian forces began a counter-offensive to drive Russian forces away from the city and towards the international border. By 12 May, the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence reported that Russia had withdrawn units from the Kharkiv area.^[122] Russian artillery and rockets remain within range of the city, and it continues to suffer shelling^[123] and missile strikes.^[124][125]

Geography

Kharkiv is located at the banks of the Kharkiv, Lopan, and Udy rivers, where they flow into the Siverskyi Donets watershed in the north-eastern region of Ukraine.

Historically, Kharkiv lies in the Sloboda Ukraine region (Slobozhanshchyna also known as Slobidshchyna) in Ukraine, in which it is considered to be the main city.

The approximate dimensions of city of Kharkiv are: from the North to the South — 24.3 km; from the West to the East — 25.2 km.

Based on Kharkiv's topography, the city can be conditionally divided into four lower districts and four higher districts.

The highest point above sea level, in Piatykhatky, is 202m, and the lowest is Novoselivka in Kharkiv is 94m.^{[citation needed]}

Kharkiv lies in the large valley of rivers of Kharkiv, Lopan, Udy, and Nemyshlia. This valley lies from the North West to the South East between the Mid Russian highland and Donets lowland. All the rivers interconnect in Kharkiv and flow into the river of Northern Donets. A special system of concrete and metal dams was designed and built by engineers to regulate the water level in the rivers in Kharkiv.^{[citation needed]}

Kharkiv has a large number of green city parks with a long history of more than 100 years with very old oak trees and many flowers.^{[citation needed]} Central Park is Kharkiv's largest public garden. The park has nine areas: children, extreme sports, family entertainment, a medieval area, entertainment center, French park, cable car, sports grounds, retro park. This park was previously named after Maxim Gorky until June 2023 when it was renamed Central Park for Culture and Recreation.^[126]

Climate

Kharkiv's climate is humid continental (Köppen climate classification Dfa/Dfb) with long, cold, snowy winters and warm to hot summers.

The average rainfall totals 519 mm (20 in) per year, with the most in June and July.