Vinnytsia Oblast - Geography

Geography

The area of the region is 26,500 km²; its population (as of 2004-05-01) is 1.7 million.

The Vinnytsia Oblast was founded on February 27, 1932, its area makes 4.5% of the state's territory. The oblast is located in the central part of the Right Bank Ukraine and borders on seven administrative oblasts of Ukraine. In the southwest of the oblast along the Dnister river passes a 202 kilometer long section of the state border with Moldova.

Administratively the oblast's territory is divided into 27 village districts, the oblast center is divided into 3 town districts. The oblast has 17 towns, 30 town type villages and 1,467 villages. The town of Vinnytsia, which is over 630 years old, has more than 400 thousand residents.

As of 1 January 1997 the urban population of the oblast was 886,700 and the rural 975,500. The population density is 70 people per km². The proportion of employable population is 56.4%.

The Vinnytsya oblast is a land with an appreciable mineral raw material base. 1,159 deposits and manifestations of various mineral resources, tens of peat deposits, unique deposits of granite and kaolin, garnet and fluorite have been explored. A number of medicinal mineral water springs have been found in the oblast, they function as well as radon's water springs in the town of Khmilnyk. Having such invaluable mineral springs the Vinnytsya oblast may soon take the leading position in their export to CIS countries or to the world market.

The oblast has the world largest deposit of competitive mineral raw material kaolin (800million t). The range of its use is very broad: paper, ceramic (porcelain/faience), electrical engineering (insulators), refractory, aluminum, textile, cable, rubber, chemical and soap industries as well as perfumery, manufacture of pencils and mineral paints.

Unique decorative qualities of Vinnytsia's granites, sobites, vinnytsites, charnockites allow to manufacture stone, facing slabs, window sills, monuments, etc.

Three granite deposits (whose resources are 10 million cu.m) have been explored and are being mined, an experimental mining is carried out in eight developed deposits. Enterprises are provided with resources for more than 100 years.

The Vinnytsia oblast is the only oblast of Ukraine containing large pelicanite resources (39 deposits with the total inferred resources of about 170 million tons).

The brown coal of the Vinnytsia land is similar in quality to that mined in well known brown coal mines of the Dniprobas and can be well used for energy purposes, for processing by semicoking and hydrogenation methods. Three deposits in the oblast with resources about 50million t have been preliminarily explored and three more are in the process.

The building materials industry widely uses local sand and gravel. There are five sand deposits, all of which are exploited, one of them is for silicate bricks, three for building mortars and one for ballast.

In the Vinnytsya land there have been revealed and are being employed the therapeutic properties of the mineral water of the Khmilnyk radon deposit. Also 21 table water springs have been prospected, ten of them have been certified and at five deposits filling has been arranged ("Rehina", "Kniazhna", "Shumylivska", "Podilska" and "Rosiana"). "Myrhorodska" type mineral water has been found. Revealing new radon deposits is possible.

Bauxite (the ore for aluminum making) has been found for the first time in Podillia. The geologists took stock of their resources that are about 3 million tons.