Rivne was first mentioned in 1283 in the Polish annals Rocznik kapituły krakowskiej[5][6] as one of the inhabited places of Halych-Volhynia near which Leszek II the Black was victorious over a part of the Grand Ducal Lithuanian Army.

[5][6] In 1479 Semen Nesvizh died and his settlement was passed to his wife Maria who started to call herself princess of Rivne.

Following the Second Partition of Poland in 1793 Rivne became a part of the Russian Empire, and in 1797 it was declared to be a county level (uyezd) town of the Volhynian Governorate.

During World War I and the period of chaos shortly after, it was briefly under German, Ukrainian, Bolshevik and Polish rule.

In late April 1919 one of the Ukrainian military leaders Volodymyr Oskilko attempted to organize a coup-d'état against the Directorate led by Symon Petliura and the cabinet of Borys Martos and replace them with Yevhen Petrushevych as president of Ukraine.

At the conclusion of the conflict, in accordance with the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, it became a part of Polish Volhynian Voivodeship, a situation which would last until the Second World War.

On 2 February 1944, the city was captured by the Red Army in the Battle of Rivne, and remained under Soviet control until Ukraine regained its independence on the break-up of the USSR in 1991.

[2] In 1992, a 20,000-square-metre (4.9-acre) memorial complex was established at the site of the World War II massacre to commemorate the 17,500 Jews murdered there in November 1941 during the Holocaust, marking the mass grave with an obelisk inscribed in Yiddish, Hebrew and Ukrainian.

[9] On 6 June 2012, the World War II Jewish burial site was vandalised, as part of an antisemitic attack.

[10] On 14 March 2022, Rivne TV Tower has experienced heavy missile attack by Russian troops.

[18] The average annual precipitation is 598 mm (24 in) June and July being the wettest months and January and February the driest.

The first was a machine building and metal processing factory capable of producing high-voltage apparatus, tractor spare parts and others.

[citation needed] As an important cultural center, Rivne hosts a humanities and a hydro-engineering university, as well as a faculty of the Kyiv State Institute of Culture,[citation needed] and medical and musical as well as automobile-construction, commercial, textile, agricultural and cooperative polytechnic colleges.