A small city located near the front line with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine will become New York, restoring its former name under a resolution passed by the Verkhovna Rada.
In a tweet on Twitter, the US Embassy in Ukraine congratulated “the people of New York and the Donetsk region,” saying it was “another reason to celebrate our close relationship.” "We are very impressed with your old new name!" the embassy said.
More than 300 Ukrainian deputies supported the "return of the historical name" to this city, which has tens of thousands of residents and is located about thirty kilometers from Donetsk, one of the strongholds of pro-Russian separatists.
The deputies agreed with this to a proposal submitted by a number of residents of the city, which was founded in the eighteenth century and was a village at that time. Its name became New York a century later, for a reason that is still unknown.
From the hypotheses cited by some media outlets, it got this name from German settlers who settled there.
In 1951, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War with the United States, its name was changed to Novgorodsky for “ideological political reasons” put forward by the Communist Party according to an explanatory memorandum attached to the decision of the Verkhovna Rada.
Today, the United States is the main source of support for Ukraine in the face of Russia, which annexed the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and is the military and financial sponsor of the separatists who are fighting a war with Kiev´s forces in the east of the country.
This conflict has killed more than 13,000 people in seven years.
