Kotelva

Kotelva lies on the river of the same name, a tributary of the Vorskla in the Dnipro basin. A Cossack town on the edge of the forest-steppe, it belonged to different regiments of the Hetmanate during the seventeenth century. Its people lived close to routes used by raiding forces as well as by the armies that crossed Ukraine during the Great Northern War.

In the 1670s Tatars attacked Kotelva and neighbouring towns. During the Swedish campaign of 1708–1709 the inhabitants supported the Russian side, and Charles XII's army reached the town in January 1709. Kotelva subsequently passed to the Okhtyrka Sloboda regiment. A description compiled in 1768 counted nine wooden churches and more than a thousand ordinary households, a picture of a substantial settlement grown in the frontier country.