Оңтүстік Буг өзені: Украинаның табиғаты мен тарихы

River in Ukraine
the river in southern Ukraine

The Southern Bug, also called Southern Buh (Південний Буг; Южный Буг; Bugul de Sud or just Bug), is a navigable river located in Ukraine. It is the second longest river in Ukraine. The source of the river is in the west of Ukraine, in the Volyn Podillia Upland, about from the Polish border, from where it flows southeasterly into the Bug Estuary (Black Sea basin) through the southern steppes. It is long and drains
Several regionally important cities and towns in Ukraine are located on the Southern Bug. Beginning in Western Ukraine and moving downstream, in a southeasterly direction, they are: Khmelnytskyi, Khmilnyk, Vinnytsia, Haivoron, Pervomaisk, Voznesensk and Mykolaiv. During the Migration Period of the 5th to the 8th centuries CE the Southern Bug represented a major obstacle to all the migrating peoples in the area. The long standing local Slavic name of the river, Boh (Cyrillic: Бог), The 17th century French military engineer and geographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan recorded the name of the river as Bog.

From the 16th to the 18th centuries most of the south of Ukraine was under Turkish imperial domination and the colonists renamed the river using their language to the Aq su, meaning the "White river". Indigenous Slavic toponyms were re established after the conquest of the Pontic region from Turkish domination in the 17th and 18th centuries. On March 6, 1918, the Central Council of the Ukrainian People's Republic adopted a law on the "administrative territorial division of Ukraine", dividing it into regional districts. One of these, Pobozhia (meaning lands of the Boh, Побожжя), was in the upstream lands of the Southern Bug, near the source of the river.

In October 2020, the Southern Bug was stocked with three hundred and fifty kilograms of Hungarian carp and 50 kilograms of silver carp at Khmelnytskyi.

The Varvarivskyi Bridge over Southern Bug in Mykolaiv is a swing bridge (facilitating ship building) with Europe's largest span (134 m). It is also the southernmost bridge over the river.

The river is technically navigable for dozens of kilometers up from its mouth; several river ports (such as Mykolaiv) exist. In 2011, plans were announced to revive commercial freight navigation on the Southern Bug upstream of Mykolaiv, to facilitate the increasing grain export from Ukraine. As of April 2018, freight navigation was renewed between the estuary and a newly built grain terminal in the village of Prybuzhany, Voznesensk Raion, in the center of the Mykolaiv Oblast.