Transliteration of geographic names

After 20 years of independence, transliteration (aka romanization or latinization) of Ukrainian geographic names is still a huge mess.

There are multiple systems that are applied by different Ukrainian, US and international agencies in a way that is far from consistent. To make things even worse, some of the proper names are trasliterated based on their Ukrainian spelling/pronunciation by some, whereas others romanize their Soviet Russian spelling/pronunciation. Commercial publishers often do not adhere to any system at all and just spell proper names any way they want. Because of this, one might come across over a dozen different spellings of the same proper name in official sources, guidebooks and maps, let alone on the Internet. Examples: Kyyiv, Kyiv, Kiev; L'viv, Lviv, Lvov; etc.

In an attempt to make the information provided on this web site as universally useful as possible, I try to provide some most common variants of the geographic names used. These lists are not complete and are not meant to be such. Also, variants listed here do not reflect my views on the sovereignty over geographic features.

For more information and more complete lists of variants, the following might be good starting points:
Romanization of Ukrainian, a Wikipedia article
GEOnet Names Server of the National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency