Located by the Black Sea and on the Dnieper River, Kherson is the home to a major ship-building industry and is a regional economic centre.

The Russian Empire annexed the territory from the Crimean Khanate in 1774, and a decree of Catherine the Great on 18 June 1778 founded Kherson on the high bank of the Dnieper as a central fortress of the Black Sea Fleet.

1783 saw the city granted the rights of a district town and the opening of a local shipyard where the hulls of the Russian Black Sea fleet were laid.

[citation needed] According to the Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries from 1880, the city was mostly inhabited by Ukrainians, Greeks and Jews.

[16] The Bolsheviks dissolved SR-dominated Assembly after its first sitting,[17] and proceeded to force from Kiev the Central Council of Ukraine (Tsentralna Rada) whose response to the Leninist coup had been to proclaim the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR).

But, before the Bolsheviks could secure Kherson, they were obliged to cede the region under the terms of the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the German and Austrian controlled Ukrainian State.

After the withdrawal of German and Austrian forces in November 1918, the efforts of the UPR (the Petluirites) to assert authority were frustrated by a French-led Allied intervention which occupied Kherson in January 1919.

[18] In March 1919, the Green Army of local warlord Otaman Nykyfor Hryhoriv ousted the French and Greek garrison and precipitated the Allied evacuation from Odesa.

In July, the Bolsheviks defeated Hryhoriv who had called upon the Ukrainian people to rise against the "Communist impostors" and their "Jewish commissars",[19] and had perpetrated pogroms,[19] including in the Kherson region.

[23] In September 1941, the Germans executed the city's remaining Jewish population, several thousand men, women and children, in anti-tank ditches near the village of Zelenivka.

Over the following three decades, the population of both the city and the region declined, reflecting both a significant excess of deaths over live births and persistent net-emigration from the area.

It also found that, while more inclined to express support for co-operation with Russia than for membership of the EU, "citizens in Kherson feel attached to their Ukrainian identity".

[39][40][41] The Volodymyr Saldo Bloc dissolved; its deputies in Kyiv joined the newly formed faction "Support to the programs of the President of Ukraine".

[49][50] According to the Ukrainian government, the Russian military sought to create a puppet Kherson People's Republic in the style of the Russian-backed separatist polities in the Donbas region and tried to coerce local councillors into endorsing the move, detaining those activists and officials who opposed their design.

[53] The next day, Ukraine's Prosecutor General said that troops used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse a further pro-Ukraine rally in the city centre.

Citing unnamed reports about alleged discrimination against Russian speakers, its deputy head, Kirill Stremousov, said that "reintegrating the Kherson region back into a Nazi Ukraine is out of the question".

[56] Russian forces were ordered to withdraw from the city by defence minister Sergei Shoigu and regroup on the eastern side of the Dnieper on 9 November 2022.