Svitlovodsk

Svitlovodsk is a city on the banks of the Dnieper River in Oleksandriia Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, in central Ukraine, and the administrative centre of the Svitlovodsk urban hromada. It was created in the 1950s to replace Novogeorgievsk, which lay in the flood plain of the reservoir for the Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Power Plant, and to house the dam workers. It was first named Khrushchev and between 1962 and 1969 it was briefly called Kremhes, as a satellite city of Kremenchuk. Until 2020 it was a city of oblast significance with its own municipality, which was then merged into Oleksandriia Raion. The 2022 estimate puts its population at about 43,130. Local culture divides it into Old and New Svitlovodsk, and the cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko was born there.