Luhansk

Luhansk grew beside the Luhan River in the eastern steppe, around an iron foundry established under the Russian Empire. The Scottish industrialist Charles Gascoigne was sent to examine the region's coal and iron deposits in 1794. The following year Catherine II approved the construction of a foundry intended to supply cannon and ammunition for the Black Sea fleet.

The enterprise brought workers and technical expertise to a district where coal had already been identified. Its furnaces and workshops gave the emerging settlement an industrial purpose distinct from the older villages and pastoral lands around it. The foundry connected resources of the Donets basin to the needs of a navy operating far to the south, and the settlement that formed around it took its name from the river.