As a result of the migrations, the city fell and the inhabitants lived in small settlements built on the shores of the Bug and Dnieper Rivers.

The name is supposed to come from a plant known in Romanian as bozii or bozia (Sambucus ebulus), a medicinal herb frequently found there.

Alexandru cel Bun (Alexander I, the Good), ruler of Moldavia (r. 1400–1432), and his ally Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1392–1430), freed the Vozia territory and a fortress was built again close to Alektor's ruins.

In the 14th century the Senarega brothers, Genovese merchants and warriors, had settled a castle at the place called "Lerici" very close to Vozia city.

It was a good point for commerce with Romanians and Tatars, but the Senarega family's interference in Moldavia's internal affairs made the Moldavians from Cetatea Albă (today's Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi) take the castle from them in 1455.

In some sources, it is stated that this place was built by Meñli I Giray in 1492 on an ancient Greek city called Alektor and was named Karakerman.

Lawryn Piaseczynski, secretary of the Polish king Sigismund III Vasa, traveling with a diplomatic mission to Gazi Giray Khan, traversing the region of Cetatea Albă (Ak-Kerman) and the Vozia or Oceakov region, found only "Moldavian villages under the Tatar Khan's domination, ruled in his name by Nazyl Aga" ("sate moldoveneşti pe care le ţine hanul tătărăsc şi pe care le guvernează în numele lui sluga lui Nazyl aga")[5] Similar notes were made by Giovanni Botero (1540–1617) in Relazioni universali (Venice 1591); Gian Lorenzo d'Anania in L'Universale fabbrica del Mondo, ovvero Cosmografia (Napoli 1573, Venice 1596 etc.)

Daniel Krman wrote that apart from the Turks and Tatars, the conquerors of Vozia, the city was inhabited by Moldavians (Romanians) and a number of Greek merchants.

[6] During the Russo-Turkish War (1735–1739), the Russian Empire, viewing the Ottoman fortress as the key for obtaining control of the Black Sea littoral, besieged it in 1737.

Russian troops commanded by Marshal von Münnich took the fortress by storm (July 1737), but the following year Russia abandoned it, restoring it to Turkey in 1739.

During the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792, Russian land forces under Alexander Suvorov and naval units commanded by John Paul Jones started a second siege of Ochakov, which began in the summer of 1788 and lasted six months.

This was the first time in the city's history that the ethnological and sociological research of Ochakiv's Romanians survivors were made by Anton Golopenția.

On the Kinburn peninsula are located the National park "White Bank of Svyatoslav" and the "Volzhyn forest" of Black Sea Biosphere Preserve.