31 years of the national .ua domain: how Ukrainian Internet independence was born
Ukraine’s .ua domain, which has become a symbol of the country’s Internet independence, is celebrating its 31st anniversary. Its foundation in 1992 coincided with the time of Ukraine’s independence.
On December 1, 31 years ago, Jonathan Postel, a prominent developer of Internet protocols and representative of the IANA, registered a top-level domain for Ukraine, adding it to the root servers. By the end of 1992, regional domains were also created for oblasts, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Kyiv, and Sevastopol.
The Hostmaster organization currently manages the UA domain zone in Ukraine, providing technical infrastructure and domain name registration through accredited registrars. According to the latest data, as of December 1, 2023, more than 558 thousand domain names were registered in the .ua zone.
Cityhost also reports that Russian-language domains prevail over Ukrainian-language domainsIn particular, there are almost 40 thousand domains in the kiev.ua zone, while kyiv.ua (the Ukrainian-language counterpart) has only about 3 thousand. The process of de-Russification of domains in the .ua zone is aimed at abandoning the Soviet Russified heritage, similar to renaming streets or dismantling monuments.
Cityhost has previously initiated the de-Russification of Ukrainian domains, encouraging the use of correct Ukrainian names for local domains (for example, kharkiv.ua instead of kharkov.ua). The idea of Ukrainization of the .ua domain, although not new, is gaining particular relevance in the current environment.
In 2018, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, together with the Center for Strategic Communications “StratCom Ukraine”, launched the initiative “KyivNotKiev” as part of the broader “CorrectUA” campaign, which aims to change the transliteration in English not only for Kyiv but also for the names of other Ukrainian cities. The transliteration of the names of Ukrainian cities from Russian became established because of the Russification policy pursued by the tsarist and then the Soviet governments.
Currently, there are 8 zones in the Ukrainian domain name segment that have a dual spelling – there is a variant based on the Ukrainian city name and a Russified analog:
- kyiv.ua – kiev.ua
- kharkiv.ua – kharkov.ua
- odessa.ua – odesa.ua
- mykolaiv.ua – nikolaev.ua
- rivne.ua – rovno.ua
- chernivtsi.ua – chernovtsi.ua
- chernihiv.ua – chernigov.ua
- cherkasy.ua – cherkassy.ua
Ukraine and Ukrainians want to teach the world not to equate Ukrainian names with Russian ones. To do this, you need to start with yourself and actively switch to Ukrainian-language domain names.
