Kirovohrad Oblast

Kirovohrad Oblast is a province in central Ukraine whose administrative centre is the city of Kropyvnytskyi. The city was renamed from Kirovohrad in 2016 under decommunisation laws, but the oblast kept its name because it is written into the Constitution of Ukraine, and a 2019 ruling of the Constitutional Court found the change to Kropyvnytskyi Oblast constitutional without it ever being carried out. The province covers about 24,600 square kilometres and had an estimated 903,712 residents in 2022, making it the second least populated oblast of Ukraine after Chernivtsi. Its largest cities are Kropyvnytskyi, Oleksandriia, Znamianka and Svitlovodsk, and the city of Dobrovelychkivka is described as the geographical centre of Ukraine. Most of the territory lies in historic Right-bank Ukraine and Zaporizhzhia, while its western outskirts belong to historic Podolia. The oblast was created within the Ukrainian SSR on 10 January 1939 from the northern raions of Mykolaiv Oblast, and in 1954 it lost some raions to the newly created Cherkasy Oblast before receiving its western raions from Odesa Oblast.