Kherson (Ukrainian and Russian: Херсон, Ukrainian: [xerˈsɔn] ⓘ, Russian: [xʲɪrˈson]) is a port city in southern Ukraine that serves as the administrative centre of Kherson Oblast. Located by the Black Sea and on the Dnieper River, Kherson is the home to a major ship-building industry and is a regional economic centre. At the beginning of 2022, its population was estimated at 279,131.
The city was founded as a base for the Russian Empire's Black Sea Fleet on the site of a fortress previously established by Zaporozhian Cossacks. During the 19th and early 20th century Kherson served as the regional capital of eponymous governorate, becoming a major centre of trade and transport. Under the Soviet rule the city became a major scientific, cultural and industrial centre known for its shipbuilding industry. In modern Ukraine the city is also famous for its watermelons.
From March to November 2022, the city was occupied by Russian forces during their invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces recaptured the city on 11 November 2022. In June 2023, part of the city was flooded following the Russian destruction of the nearby Kakhovka Dam. Since liberation, Kherson has become a target of the human safari Russian terror campaign of deliberate drone targeting of civilians, killing about 200 people as of October 2025 per the UN report.
Etymology
As the first new settlement in the "Greek project" of Empress Catherine and her favourite Grigory Potemkin, it was named after the Heraclea Pontic colony of Chersonesus (Ancient Greek: Χερσόνησος, romanized: Khersónēsos [kʰer.só.nɛː.sos]) which was located on the Crimean Peninsula, meaning 'peninsular shore'.
History
Historical affiliations
Predecessor settlements and the founding of Kherson
Kherson was preceded by the town of Bilechowisce, first marked on a map by Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan from 1648. Bilchowisce was listed as one of the three chief towns of Yedisan in a 1701 book by English cartographer Herman Moll. A French-language map of the site in 1769 (inset) shows a Russian-built fort or sconce named St. Alexandre. This had been built in 1737 during the Russo-Turkish War and served the Zaporizhian Sich as an administrative center, run by local Cossacks.
The Russian Empire annexed the territory from the Crimean Khanate in 1774, and a decree of Catherine the Great on 18 June 1778 founded Kherson on the high bank of the Dnieper as a central fortress of the Black Sea Fleet.
1783 saw the city granted the rights of a district town and the opening of a local shipyard where the hulls of the Russian Black Sea fleet were laid. Within a year the Kherson Shipping Company began operations. By the end of the 18th century, the port had established trade with France, Italy, Spain and other European countries. Between 1783 and 1793 Poland's maritime trade via the Black Sea was conducted through Kherson by the Kompania Handlowa Polska. The Poles leased a piece of the shoreline and built houses, exchange offices, workshops and warehouses. There was substantial immigration of Poles and a Polish consulate was established in 1783. In 1791, Potemkin was buried in the newly built St. Catherine's Cathedral. In 1803 the city became the capital of the Kherson Governorate.
Industry, beginning with breweries, tanneries and other food and agricultural processing, developed from the 1850s. According to the Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries from 1880, the city was mostly inhabited by Ukrainians, Greeks and Jews. According to the 1897 census, the population of the city was 59,076 of which, on the basis of their first language, 47.2% were recorded as Russian, 29.1% as Jewish, 19.6% Ukrainian, 1.7% Polish. During the revolution of 1905 there were workers' strikes and an army mutiny (an armed demonstration by soldiers of the 10th Disciplinary Battalion) in the city.
Early Ukrainian and Soviet rule
In the Russian Constituent Assembly election held in November 1917—the first and last free election in Kherson for 70 years—Bolsheviks who had seized power in Petrograd and Moscow received just 13.2 percent of the vote in the Governorate. The largest electoral bloc in the district, with 43 percent of the vote, was an alliance of Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Russian Socialist Revolutionaries and the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party.
The Bolsheviks dissolved the SR-dominated Constituent Assembly after its first sitting and, in December 1917, having declared the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, forced from Kyiv the Central Council of Ukraine (Tsentralna Rada) whose response to the Leninist coup had been to proclaim the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). But, before the Bolsheviks could secure Kherson, they were obliged to cede the region under the terms of the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the German and Austrian controlled Ukrainian State. When German and Austrian forces withdrew in November 1918, the efforts of the Petluirites to assert authority of the UPR were frustrated by a French-led Allied intervention which occupied Kherson in January 1919.
In March 1919, the Green Army of local warlord Otaman Nykyfor Hryhoriv ousted the French and Greek garrison and precipitated the Allied evacuation from Odesa. In July, the Bolsheviks defeated Hryhoriv who had called upon the Ukrainian people to rise against the "Communist impostors" and their "Jewish commissars", and had perpetrated pogroms, including in the Kherson region. Kherson itself was occupied by the counter-revolutionary Whites before finally falling to the Bolshevik Red Army in February 1920. Afterwards it was administratively part of the Mykolaiv Governorate of Ukraine. On 30 December 1922, as part of what was now the constituent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the city and region were incorporated within the newly-declared Soviet Union.
The population was radically reduced from 75,000 to 41,000 by the famine of 1921–1923, but then rose steadily, reaching 97,200 in 1939.
World War II
In 1940, the city was one of the sites of executions of Polish officers and intelligentsia committed by the Soviets as part of the Katyn massacre.
Further devastation and population loss resulted from the German occupation during the Second World War. The German occupation, which lasted from August 1941 to March 1944, contended with both Soviet and Ukrainian nationalist (OUN) underground cells. The Kherson district leadership of the OUN was headed by Bohdan Bandera (brother of OUN leader Stepan Bandera).
In September 1941, the Germans executed the city's remaining Jewish population, several thousand men, women and children, in anti-tank ditches near the village of Zelenivka. Later, they used the place to bury Soviet soldiers from a prisoner-of-war camp in the city (Stalag 370).
Post-war period
In the post-war decades, which saw substantial industrial growth, the population more than doubled, reaching 261,000 by 1970. The new factories, including the Comintern Shipbuilding and Repairs Complex, the Kuibyshev Ship Repair Complex, and the Kherson Cotton Textile Manufacturing Complex (one of the largest textile plants in the Soviet Union), and Kherson's growing grain-exporting port, drew in labour from the Ukrainian countryside. This changed the city's ethnic composition, increasing the Ukrainian share from 36% in 1926 to 63% in 1959, while reducing the Russian share from 36 to 29%. The Jewish population never recovered from the Holocaust visited by the Germans: accounting for 26% of residents in 1926, their number had fallen to just 6% in 1959.
In independent Ukraine
With a turnout of 83.4% of eligible voters, 90.1% of the votes cast in Kherson Oblast affirmed Ukrainian independence in the national referendum of 1 December 1991. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kherson and its industries experienced severe dislocation. Over the following three decades, the population of both the city and the region declined, reflecting both a significant excess of deaths over live births and persistent net-emigration from the area.
The 2014 pro-Russian unrest in eastern and southern Ukraine was marked in Kherson by a small demonstration of some 400 persons. Following the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, Kherson housed the office of the Ukrainian President's representative in Crimea.
In July 2020, as part of the general administrative reform of Ukraine, the Kherson Municipality was merged as Kherson urban hromada into newly established Kherson Raion, one of five raions in the Kherson Oblast of which the city remained the administrative centre.
A "City Profile", part of the SCORE (Social Cohesion and Reconciliation) Ukraine 2021 project funded by USAID, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the European Union, concluded that "more than 80% of citizens in Kherson city feel their locality is a good place to live, work, and raise a family". This was despite a low level of trust in the local authorities in whom corruption was perceived to be high. It also found that, while more inclined to express support for co-operation with Russia than for membership of the EU, "citizens in Kherson feel attached to their Ukrainian identity".
2020 local election
In the last free elections before the 2022 Russian invasion, the Ukrainian local elections held on 25 October 2020, the results of Kherson City Council elections were as follows:
The parties widely perceived as pro-Russian, and Euro-skeptic, Opposition Platform, Volodymyr Saldo Bloc, and Party of Shariy (3.9%) had a combined vote of just over 30% of the total, and secured 20 out of the 54 seats on the city council. In the wake of the invasion, the Opposition Platform and the Party of Shariy were banned by the National Security Council for alleged ties to the Kremlin.
The Volodymyr Saldo Bloc dissolved; its deputies in Kyiv joined the newly formed faction "Support to the programs of the President of Ukraine". From 26 April 2022, Volodymyr Saldo himself, who had been mayor of Kherson from 2002 to 2012, went on to serve the Russian occupiers, as head of the Kherson military–civilian administration.
Russian invasion from February 2022
Kherson witnessed heavy fighting in the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Kherson offensive). As of 2 March the city was under Russian control, and as early as 8 March the Russian FSB was reported to be tasked with crushing resistance.
Under the Russian occupation, locals continued to stage street protests against the invading army's presence and in support of the unity of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, the Russian military sought to create a puppet Kherson People's Republic in the style of the Russian-backed separatist polities in the Donbas region and tried to coerce local councillors into endorsing the move, detaining those activists and officials who opposed their design.
By 26 April 2022, Russian troops had taken over the city's administration headquarters and had appointed both a new mayor, former KGB agent Alexander Kobets, and ex-mayor Volodymyr Saldo as a new civilian-military regional administrator. The next day, Ukraine's Prosecutor General said that troops used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse a further pro-Ukraine rally in the city centre. In an indication of an intended split from Ukraine, on the 28th the new administration announced that from May it would switch the region's payments to the Russian ruble. Citing unnamed reports about alleged discrimination against Russian speakers, its deputy head, Kirill Stremousov, said that "reintegrating the Kherson region back into a Nazi Ukraine is out of the question".
On 30 September 2022, the Russian Federation claimed to have annexed Kherson Oblast. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the proclaimed annexations with a vote of 143–5.
Russian forces were ordered to withdraw from the city by defence minister Sergei Shoigu and regroup on the eastern side of the Dnieper on 9 November 2022. Ukrainian officials claimed that Russian troops were destroying bridges connecting the city to the other bank of the river. On 11 November, Ukraine announced that its forces had entered the city following the Russian withdrawal.
Before retreating, the Russian army destroyed infrastructure facilities of the city (communications, water, heat, electricity, TV tower), looted two main museums (Local History Museum and the Art Museum), transporting their items to Crimean museums, and took away several monuments to historical figures.
In June 2023, the city was flooded following the Russian destruction of the nearby Kakhovka Dam.