The Dnipro is the fourth longest river in Europe at about 2200 km, of which roughly 1000 are in Ukraine. It rises in Russia, crosses Belarus and cuts Ukraine in half from north to south before reaching the Black Sea. Kyivan Rus was built on it as a trade route from the Baltic to Byzantium.
Khortytsia
The largest island on the river, 12 km long, at Zaporizhzhia. It is closely tied to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the self-governing military brotherhood that dominated the lower Dnipro from the sixteenth century, whose fortified camps, the Sich, moved several times along the rapids. The island is a national reserve with a reconstructed Sich, Scythian burial mounds and the granite outcrops that remain of the rapids.
The rapids and the dams
Below Dnipro city the river once fell through nine sets of rapids that stopped navigation and shaped the Cossack way of life. The DniproHES dam, completed in 1932 and at the time the largest hydroelectric station in Europe, drowned them. Five more dams followed, turning the river into a chain of reservoirs.
Kaniv
Halfway between Kyiv and Cherkasy, the poet Taras Shevchenko is buried on a hill above the river, as he asked in his most famous poem. The site is a place of pilgrimage of a kind that is hard to overstate; Shevchenko is not simply a national poet but the figure through whom modern Ukrainian identity was articulated.
Kyiv and the beaches
At Kyiv the river is 1.5 km wide with wooded islands in the middle. Trukhaniv Island and Hydropark have sand beaches, reached on foot or by metro, and the city swims there all summer.
Kakhovka
On 6 June 2023 the Kakhovka dam in the occupied south was destroyed, emptying a reservoir of 18 cubic kilometres. Dozens of settlements downstream were flooded, at least tens of people died, mines were washed into new areas, and the reservoir bed has since become a grassland of willow. It was the largest single environmental event of the war and its consequences for irrigation in the south will last decades.
Practicalities
River cruises operated from Kyiv before 2022 and do not now. The Dnipro is a front line for part of its length and the entire lower river is a restricted military area. Northern and central stretches at Kyiv and Kaniv are accessible.