page_title: Russians in Ukraine
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Russians in Ukraine / Geography
caption_attribution_description: Українська: Biggest nationality according to 2001 census: Найбільш чисельна національність за даними перепису 2001 року
context_page_description: Russians in Ukraine are the largest ethnic minority in the country, which community forms the largest single Russian diaspora in the world. In the 2001 Ukrainian census, 8,334,100 identified as ethnic Russians, this is the combined figure for persons originating from outside of Ukraine and the Ukrainian born population declaring Russian ethnicity.
context_section_description: Ethnic Russians live throughout Ukraine. They comprise a notable fraction of the overall population in the east and south, a significant minority in the center, and larger minority in the west.
  The west and the center of the country feature a higher percentage of Russians in cities and industrial centers and much smaller percentage in the overwhelmingly Ukrainophone rural areas. Due to the concentration of the Russians in the cities, as well as for historic reasons, most of the largest cities in the center and the south-east of the country (including Kiev where Russians amount to 13.1% of the population) remained largely Russophone as of 2003.
  Traditionally mixed Russo-Ukrainian populated territories are mainly historic Novorossiya (New Russia) and Sloboda Ukraine – now both split between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
  Russians constitute the majority in the Crimea (71.7% in Sevastopol and 58.5% in the Autonomous republic of Crimea), the southern peninsula which the Soviet government transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954.
  However outside the Crimea, Russians are the largest ethnic group in only a tiny handful of units: Donetsk (48.2%) and Makiyivka (50.8%) in Donetsk Oblast, Ternivka (52.9%) in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Krasnodon (63.3%) and Sverdlovsk (58.7%) and Krasnodonskyi raion (51.7%) and Stanychno-Luhanskyi (61.1%) raion in Luhansk Oblast, Reni (70.54%) and Izmail (43.7%) in Odessa oblast, Putyvl Raion (51.6%) in Sumy Oblast.
caption: Largest ethnicity in Ukraine's cities and raions according to 2001 census. Russians are in blue
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