Raions of Ukraine

Raions of Ukraine
Raions after the administrative reform of 2020
CategorySecond-level subdivision
Location Ukraine
Created
  • 1922
Number136 (as of 2020)
Populations~150,000
Areas1,200 km2 (460 sq mi)
Government
  • Raion council
Subdivisions

A raion (Ukrainian: район, romanizedraion; pl. райони, raiony), often translated as district, is the second-level administrative division in Ukraine. Raions were created in a 1922 administrative reform of the Soviet Union, to which Ukraine, as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, belonged.[1][nb 1]

On 17 July 2020, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament) approved an administrative reform to merge most of the 490 raions, along with the "cities of regional significance", which were previously outside the raions, into just 136 reformed raions.[3] Most tasks of the raions (education, healthcare, sport facilities, culture, and social welfare) were taken over by new hromadas, the subdivisions of raions.[4] The 136 new districts include ten in Crimea, which have been de facto outside Ukrainian control since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014.

  1. ^ Liber, George O. (2016). Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954. University of Toronto Press. p. ix/xx. ISBN 9781442627086.
  2. ^ Magocsi, Paul Robert (2010). A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples. University of Toronto Press, pp. 563/564 & 722/723. ISBN 1442610212
  3. ^ "Україна з новим адмінтерустроєм: парламент створив 136 нових районів та ліквідував 490 старих". Decentralization Reform (in Ukrainian). 17 July 2020.
    "The council reduced the number of districts in Ukraine: 136 instead of 490". Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian). 17 July 2020.
  4. ^ Where did 354 districts disappear to? Anatomy of loud reform, Glavcom (7 August 2020) (in Ukrainian)


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