Ukraine's geography: a flat country built on black earth

What the black earth actually is

Ukrainian soil is conventionally read in three belts running from north-west to south-east. In the north and north-west, across about a fifth of the country, are sandy podzolized soils, formed where postglacial forest spread over ground that had been grassy steppe. They can be farmed, though they need nutrients added to give good harvests. At the opposite end, in the south and the east, the smallest share of the cover is chestnut soil, which grows steadily more saline as it approaches the Black Sea.

Between the two sits the chernozem, and it occupies about two thirds of the country's area. The belt is dark almost to black with humus, and it is not uniform. In the north the so-called deep chernozems run about 1.5 metres thick. South and east of them the ordinary or prairie chernozems are as rich in humus but only about 90 centimetres thick. The southernmost band is thinner again and carries less humus still. Grey forest soils and podzolized black earth fill in the uplands and the northern and western margins of the deep belt.

The consequence is visible in what the ground is used for. About 58% of Ukraine is arable, 2% carries permanent crops and 13% permanent pasture; forest and woodland account for 18% and everything else for the remaining 9%. Grain grown on this soil has travelled a long way for a long time, to ancient Greece in antiquity and to early modern Europe much later.

The soil has a documented failure mode as well. All of these soils are fertile when there is enough water, and intensive cultivation, particularly on the steeper slopes, has produced widespread erosion and gullying.

Why Ukraine barely rises

Ukraine occupies the south-western portion of the East European Plain and consists almost entirely of level plains at an average elevation of 175 metres above sea level. Mountainous areas occur only along the borders and account for barely 5% of the area. Between latitudes 44 and 53 degrees north, and longitudes 22 and 41 degrees east, across 603,550 square kilometres, the vertical range of the interior is a matter of tens of metres over hundreds of kilometres.

What breaks the flatness is a belt of highlands running continuously from north-west to south-east. The Dnieper Upland, between the middle reaches of the Dnieper and the Southern Buh in west-central Ukraine, is the largest of them: a rolling plain dissected by river valleys, ravines and gorges, some of them more than 300 metres deep. West of it the Volyn-Podilsk Upland reaches 471 metres at Mount Kamula. In the north-east the south-western spurs of the Central Russian Upland carry the border with Russia, and near the Sea of Azov the Donets Ridge and the Azov Upland rarely pass 300 metres.

Lowlands take the remainder. The Polissya in the north holds the southern portions of the Pripet Marshes and is crossed by numerous river valleys. The Dnieper Lowland in east-central Ukraine is flat in the west and gently rolling in the east. A third lowland runs along the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, its surface broken only by low rises and shallow depressions as it slopes to the water, and it continues into the Crimean Peninsula as the North Crimean Lowland. The peninsula joins the mainland at the Perekop Isthmus; in the far south-east the Kerch Strait separates Ukraine from Russia and connects the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.

Much of the coast is sand. Narrow spits jut out into the water, and one of them, the Arabat Spit, runs about 113 kilometres while averaging less than 8 kilometres across. The land border totals 6,993 kilometres and touches seven countries, of which 1,974 kilometres is with Russia and 90 kilometres with Slovakia. The coastline adds 2,782 kilometres, and the exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea covers 147,318 square kilometres.

Where the mountains have been pushed

The parallel ranges of the Ukrainian Carpathians extend for more than 240 kilometres along the western edge, rising from about 600 metres to about 2,000, with Mount Hoverla at 2,061 metres the highest point in the country. Most of the country's forestland is here. The lower slopes carry mixed forest, the intermediate slopes pine, and alpine meadows lie above them.

Behind the ranges is the one piece of Ukraine that belongs to a different basin. The Transcarpathian Lowland is an extension of the Great Hungarian Plain and sits within the eastern Pannonian Basin, so the short western borders, 103 kilometres with Hungary and 90 with Slovakia, are drawn across flat ground on the far side of a watershed. One village on the Slovak line, Veľké Slemence, is split between the two states.

The second range is at the opposite corner and does more per kilometre than its size suggests. The Crimean Mountains form the southern coast of the peninsula and reach 1,545 metres at Mount Roman-Kosh. They shelter a strip of shore about 10 kilometres wide where the climate stops behaving like the rest of the country's.

How almost every river reaches the same two seas

Almost all the major rivers flow north-west to south-east through the plains and empty into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. More than 95% of Ukrainian rivers belong to those two drainage basins, and a small number reach the Baltic instead. Seven are counted as major: the Desna, the Dnipro, the Dnister, the Danube, the Prypiat, the Siverskyi Donets and the Southern Buh.

The Dnieper dominates the whole centre of the country. Of its total course, 980 kilometres lie in Ukraine, making it the longest river in the country, and it drains more than half of the national territory. Kyiv, which held 2,952,301 people as of 1 January 2022, stands on it, and 69.6% of the population lived in towns and cities as of 2025.

The Southern Buh reaches the Black Sea with the Inhul as its principal tributary, and the Dniester reaches it too, its largest Ukrainian tributaries being the Stryy and the Zbruch. The middle course of the Donets, itself a tributary of the Don, crosses the south-east and supplies water to the Donets Basin. The Danube runs along the south-western frontier, and its delta forms the border with Romania.

Standing water is scarce and much of it is engineered. Marshland covers almost 3% of the country, mostly in the northern river valleys and the lower reaches of the Dnieper and the Danube. Natural lakes are few and small; Lake Svityaz in the north-west, at 28 square kilometres, is among the largest. Along the coast are limans, saline bodies that form at the mouths of rivers and ephemeral streams and are closed off from the sea by sandbars, and the country's record names the Kuialnyk Liman as its lowest point. Three large artesian basins, the Volyn-Podilsk, the Dnieper and the Black Sea, supply municipalities and farms.

Why the rain misses the steppe

Ukraine lies in a temperate zone reached by moderately warm, humid air from the Atlantic, and the continental character strengthens eastward. Average annual temperatures run from 5.5 to 7 degrees Celsius in the north and from 11 to 13 in the south. January, the coldest month, averages about minus 3 degrees in the south-west and about minus 8 in the north-east. July averages about 23 degrees in the south-east and about 18 in the north-west. Winters in the west are milder than those in the east, and summers in the east are hotter than those in the west.

Rainfall is where the arrangement turns awkward. Two to three times as much falls in the warmer seasons as in the cold, with the maximum generally in June and July and the minimum in February. The Carpathians take more than 1,200 millimetres a year. The lowlands along the Black Sea and in Crimea take less than 400. The rest of the country falls between 400 and 600 millimetres.

Precipitation therefore declines along the same axis on which the chernozem thins. The driest ground in Ukraine is also the ground with the least humus to hold what reaches it, which is why the flat, treeless plains of the steppe are cultivated with supplemental irrigation. Snow falls mainly in late November and early December and lies from a few centimetres in the southern steppe to well over a metre in the Carpathians.

The exception is the southern shore of Crimea, screened by its mountains, which has a warm Mediterranean-type climate: mild rainy winters with little snow and a January average of 4 degrees, dry hot summers and a July average of 24 degrees.

The World Bank has stated that Ukraine is highly vulnerable to climate change. Water availability from the major river basins is expected to fall, particularly in summer. The effects on agriculture are expected to be felt most in the steppe south, while in the north a longer growing season may suit some crops.

What grows between the forest and the steppe

Much of the original plant cover has been cleared for cultivation, but three zones of natural vegetation remain distinguishable from north to south: the Polissya of woodland and marsh, the forest-steppe, and the steppe.

The Polissya, in the north-west and north, is nearly a quarter mixed woodland, holding oak, elm, birch, hornbeam, ash, maple, pine, linden, alder, poplar, willow and beech. About 5% of it is peat bog, a substantial portion is marshland and the river valleys are floodplain. Major drainage works have been undertaken there to reclaim swampland for agriculture.

The forest-steppe extends south from it across about 202,000 square kilometres, of which roughly two thirds is arable and only about an eighth is forest. Beyond that the steppe covers about 231,000 square kilometres of flat, treeless plain, much of it under cultivation, and its own vegetation survives in reserves as remnants of fescue and feather grass.

Six terrestrial ecoregions are recognised: Central European mixed forests, Crimean Submediterranean forest complex, East European forest steppe, Pannonian mixed forests, Carpathian montane conifer forests and Pontic steppe. There is somewhat more coniferous than deciduous forest. Along the southern coast of Crimea a strip only about 10 kilometres wide carries both deciduous and evergreen grasses and shrubs, and nothing comparable grows anywhere else in the country.

About 45,000 animal species are recorded in Ukraine, most of them invertebrates, and approximately 385 are listed as endangered in the Red Data Book of Ukraine. Among the vertebrates there are about 350 bird species, more than 100 mammals and more than 200 fish. Wolves, foxes, wildcats and martens are the common predators; roe deer and wild pigs are the common hoofed animals, with elk and mouflon appearing occasionally. Muskrats, raccoons, beavers, nutrias and silver foxes were introduced and have acclimatised.

How the Dnieper was dammed and drained

The Dnieper's passage through Ukraine is a chain of reservoirs. The Kyiv, Kaniv, Kremenchuk, Dniprodzerzhynsk, Dnieper and Kakhovka reservoirs make up the cascade, each held behind a hydroelectric dam, and smaller reservoirs sit on the Dniester, the Southern Buh and the tributaries of the Donets. Canals carry water where the rivers do not, among them the Donets to the Donets Basin, the Dnieper to Kryvyy Rih, and the North Crimea canal onto the peninsula. The Dnieper, the Danube, the Dniester, the Pripet, the Donets and the lower Southern Buh are navigable.

That system lost its southern end in 2023. In the early hours of 6 June 2023 the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast was destroyed. The flooding downstream killed dozens of people across 46 towns and villages, carried heavily polluted water along with dislodged mines and unexploded ordnance, and wrecked irrigation systems, topsoil, equipment and crops on the small and medium farms of Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts. The reservoir behind the dam then dried almost completely. It had supplied drinking water to towns and cities in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts and irrigation water to thousands of square kilometres of land, and its exposed bed is largely toxic sand that strong winds can carry a long way.

The rest of the environmental record is older. The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant contaminated a wide area in the north with short-lived and long-lived radioactive isotopes, notably strontium-90; land near the plant will be unsafe for thousands of years, and some of it continues to be occupied and farmed. Coal-burning industry in the east emits sulphur dioxide, hydrocarbons and dust, and air quality is poor at Dnipropetrovsk, Kryvyy Rih and Zaporizhzhia. The Dnieper, the Dniester, the Inhul and the Donets carry chemical fertiliser and pesticide runoff along with poorly treated sewage. Freshwater flow into the Sea of Azov has been largely diverted for irrigation, and the sea's salinity has risen sharply.

Which parts of the land are protected

Ukraine's first nature reserve began as a private wildlife refuge at Askaniya-Nova in 1875, and it protects a portion of virgin steppe. Some 40 mammal species have been introduced there in a breeding programme for endangered animals, among them the onager and Przewalski's horse, and ostriches have been established as well. Separate sections of the Ukrainian Steppe Reserve preserve further types of steppe. The Black Sea Nature Reserve shelters many species of waterfowl and is the only Ukrainian breeding ground of the Mediterranean gull. The Danube Water Meadows Reserve protects the tidewater biota of the delta, and wetlands of international importance cover more than 7,000 square kilometres.

Ukraine ratified the World Heritage Convention on 12 October 1988 and has eight inscribed properties. Exactly one of them is natural: the Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, a transnational listing Ukraine entered in 2007 and which was extended in 2011, 2017 and 2021. The steppe reserve at Askaniya-Nova has sat on the country's tentative list since 1989 without being inscribed.

The pattern that leaves is worth stating plainly. The country's only inscribed natural property is in the Carpathians on the western rim, where the mountains are, and the black-earth belt that covers two thirds of the surface holds none.