DNIEPER RIVER

The Dnieper, Don, and Volga river basins and their drainage network. Ukrainian Dnipro, Russian Dnepr, Belorussian Dnepro, ancient (Greek) Borysthenes, river of Europe, the fourth longest after the Volga, Danube, and Ural. It is 1,367 miles (2,200 kilometres) in length and drains an area of about 195,000 square miles (505,000 square kilometres). The Dnieper rises at an altitude of about 720 feet (220 metres) in a small peat bog on the southern slope of the Valdai Hills of Russia, about 150 miles west of Moscow, and flows in a generally southerly direction through western Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to the Black Sea. For the first 300 miles, it passes through the Smolensk oblast (province) of Russia, first to the south and then to the west; near Orsha it turns south once more and for the next 370 miles flows through Belarus. Finally, it flows through Ukrainian territory: south to Kiev, southeast from Kiev to Dnipropetrovsk, and then south-southwest to the Black Sea. The Dnieper watershed includes the Volyn-Podilsk Upland, the Belarusian Ridge, the Valdai Hills, the Central Russian Upland, and the Smolensk-Moscow Upland. The centre of the basin consists of broad lowlands. Within the forest area and to some extent within the forest steppe area, the basin is covered with morainic and fluvioglacial deposits; on the steppe it is covered with loess. In some places, where the basin borders upon the basins of the Bug and the Western Dvina rivers, there is a flat swampy area. This facilitated the cutting of connecting water routes from the Dnieper to neighbouring rivers even in ancient times. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, the Dnieper was connected to the Baltic Sea by several canals: the DnieperBug Canal, running by way of the Pripet, Bug, and Vistula rivers; the Ahinski Canal by way of the Pripet and the Neman; and the Byarezina water system by way of the Byarezina and the Western Dvina. These canals later became obsolete. Ukrainian Dnipro, Russian Dnepr, Belorussian Dnepro river of Europe, the fourth longest (1,367 miles [2,200 km]) after the Volga, Danube, and Ural rivers. The Dnieper rises on the southern slopes of the Valdai Hills west of Moscow in Smolensk oblast (province), western Russia, and flows in a generally southern direction through Belarus and Ukraine and then into the Dnieper estuary of the Black Sea. The river's course can be divided roughly into three parts: the swampy upper Dnieper (800 miles [1,300 km] long) located as far downstream as Kiev, where about four-fifths of the Dnieper River basin's annual runoff forms; the forest-steppe region of the middle Dnieper (340 miles long); and the semiarid Black Sea Lowland region of the lower Dnieper (200 miles long). The major tributaries in its drainage basin of 195,000 square miles (505,000 square km) are the Desna, Sozh, Berezina, Vorskla, Teteriv, and Pripet rivers. The climate of the Dnieper basin is continental, and annual precipitation ranges from 30 to 32 inches (760 to 810 mm) in the north to about 18 inches (460 mm) in the south. More than 300 hydroelectric plants operate in the Dnieper basin, supplying water to the Donets Basin and Kryvyy Rih industrial regions and, for irrigation, to the arid lands of southern Ukraine and Crimea. Several huge dams harness the flow of the Dnieper itself; the Kremenchuk, Kakhovka, and Dnieper are among the major hydroelectric power stations on the river. The mean annual runoff of the river is 13 cubic miles (54 cubic km), but there is considerable yearly variation. The water of the Dnieper is low in minerals; it carries annually an average of 8.6 million tons (7.8 million metric tons) of dissolved matter to the sea. More than 60 species of fish are found in the Dnieper, including pike, carp, roach, goldfish, whitefish, catfish, perch, and herring. The construction of dams and reservoirs has deepened the river and facilitated navigation for about 1,042 miles (1,677 km) during the 10 months of the year when it is not frozen. The principal cargoes are coal, ore, building materials, and other bulk freight. The chief ports on the Dnieper are Dorogobuzh and Smolensk (Russia), Orsha (Belarus), and Kiev and Kherson (Ukraine).