A Greek presence throughout the Black Sea area existed long before the beginnings of Kievan Rus. For most of their history in this area, the history of the Greeks in Russia and in Ukraine forms a single narrative, of which a division according to present-day boundaries would be an artificial anachronism. established colonies on what are now the Ukrainian shores of the Black Sea as early as the 6th century B.C. These colonies traded with various ancient nations around the Black Sea, including Scythians, Maeotae, Cimmerians, Goths and predecessors of the Slavs. After the Polovtsy and Mongol-Tatar invasion of the steppes to the north, Greeks remained only in the towns on the southern slopes of the Crimean Mountains, and became divided into two sub-groups, Tatar speaking Urums and Rumaiic Pontic Greeks with Rumeíka Greek as their mother tongue. These lived among the Crimean Tatars until the Russian Empire conquered the Crimea. Then Catherine the Great decided to relocate the Pontic Greeks from Crimea to the northern shores of the Sea of Azov. New territory was assigned for them between today's cities of Mariupol and Donetsk, covering the southern portion of the Donetsk Oblast in the Ukraine. Ukrainians and Germans, and afterwards Russians, were settled among the Greeks. The Ukrainians mostly settled villages and some towns in this area, unlike the Greeks, who rebuilt their towns, even giving them their original Crimean names. Since this time in the Ukraine the names of settlements in the Crimea match names of places in the south of the Donetsk Oblast: Yalta-Yalta, Gurzuf-Urzuf, etc. Most Crimean Greeks were expelled after the Second World War. By the 2001 census 91,500 Greeks remained, the vast majority of whom (77,000) still lived in the Donetsk Oblast. Higher estimates such as 160,000 were reported previously, the fall being explained by assimilation forced by the Soviet government. Other small populations of Greeks are in Odessa and other major cities.
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