Izmail (Ukrainian: Ізмаїл, pronounced [izmɐˈjil] ⓘ; Russian: Измаил; Romanian: Ismail, Smil or Smeilu; Bulgarian: Исмаил) is a city and municipality on the Danube river in Odesa Oblast in south-western Ukraine.

The World Wildlife Fund's Isles of Izmail Regional Landscape Park is located nearby.

It belonged for a short period of time to Wallachia (14th century) – as the territory north of the Danube was one of the possessions of the Basarabs (later the land being named after them, Bessarabia).

The city was founded by a decree of Sultan Murad III, with a deed where he made the land around the crossing point, property of Habeshi Mehmed Agha which was the head of his harem.

The Sultan boasted that the fortress was impregnable, but during the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792 the Russian Army commander Alexander Suvorov successfully stormed it on 22 December 1790.

Ottoman forces inside the fortress had the orders to stand their ground to the end, haughtily declining the Russian ultimatum.

The defeat was seen as a catastrophe in the Ottoman Empire, while in Russia it was glorified in the country's first national anthem, Let the thunder of victory sound!.

Suvorov "announced the capture of Ismail in 1791 to the Tsarina Catherine in a doggerel couplet, after the assault had been pressed from house to house, room to room, and nearly every Muslim man, woman and child in the city had been killed in three days of uncontrolled massacre, 40,000 Turks dead, a few hundred taken into captivity.

With the breakup of the Russian Empire in 1917 and in the aftermath of World War I, the city was occupied by the Romanian Army on 22 January 1918, after a skirmish with troops of the Danube flotilla.

Later that year, the Sfatul Țării of Chișinău, which claimed to be the representative of the whole of Bessarabia, voted to formally unite the region with Romania.

During the Soviet period following World War II, many Russians and Ukrainians migrated to the town, gradually changing its ethnic composition.

[18] Izmail Raion, within its boundaries at that time, had 54,692 inhabitants in 2001, including 26.34% Ukrainian-speakers, 26.21% Romanian-speakers, 21.56% Russian-speakers, 24.88% Bulgarian-speaking and 0.26% Gagauz-speaking.