The history of Lysychansk starts with the human settlement of the city, which is first attested to most likely the Lower Paleolithic. In the Antiquity, the area of the city was ruled by Scythians and other steppe people. In the Medieval era, it became part of the Golden Horde, before coming briefly under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 1380s. It then became a disputed raiding zone between the Polish-Lithuanian union, the Grand Principality of Moscow, and the Crimean Khanate. The Cossacks built a fortification in 1672, followed by two settlements shortly thereafter: Bovirske in 1675 and Krasnianskyi in 1675.
In 1710, a third settlement was founded called Lisya Balka, which is popularly regarded as the city's founding. In 1721, the first discovery of coal in the entire Donbas was made in Lisya Balka. In 1753, a new settlement replaced Lisya Balka, called the Third Regiment or Verkhnie. In 1795, the first mine in the Donbas was set up in Verkhnie to supply the new foundry in Luhansk. For its first decade, this mine provided nearly all, 91.5%, of all coal production in the Donbas. However, the settlement quickly declined in the late 1860s, which was accelerated by the Emancipation reform of 1861, with the ending of the obligatory workers system. During this time also is when the name of Lysychansk began to be adopted to refer to Verkhnie. It was revitalised in the 1890s with Belgian investments, including a soda plant and an advanced new mine. Industrial activity continued into World War One, but the following Ukrainian War of Independence and wider Russian Civil War decimated the settlement from 1917 to 1919. Power changed hands from the Bolsheviks, Imperial German troops, the Ukrainian government, and the White movement. The Communists finally secured control in December 1919, and it became part of the Soviet Union in 1922.
However, the interwar period would be rough for the city, as it was hit by severe famines and banditry. Despite this, the industry began to gradually develop as an industrial centre, especially the glass industry. During the Holodomor, it became a popular site for people fleeing from rural areas, which significantly boosted the population, leading to Lysychansk being designated a city in 1938. During the Second World War afterwards, the city would be occupied twice by Nazi Germany, during which time over 2,000 people were deported and many killed, especially the local Jews as part of the Holocaust.
After the end of the war, Lysychansk rapidly grew again alongside its industry, which led multiple divisions of the city to be broken off, most notably its twin city, Sievierodonetsk. In 1989, the city reached a peak population of 127,000, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991, it became part of an independent Ukraine, and its industries were sold off and largely collapsed. The city received significant attention during the War in the Donbas, when it was occupied by the Luhansk People's Republic from April to July 2014. Less than a decade later, the city again received international attention again during the Russian invasion of Ukraine during the Battle of Lysychansk. With the city's capture by Russian forces on 2 July 2022, becoming the last major city in Luhansk Oblast to fall.
Early history Ancient period
Early inhabitation dating back to the Neanderthal era during the Lower Paleolithic has been found on the banks of Siverskyi Donets. Within Lysychansk, excavations have been done which have found, at the earliest, the bones of a mammoth, which lived until the Holocene. Surveys in the vicinity of the city have found both flint flakes and blade tools that are around 20 to 30,000 years old alongside camps near the river that are from the Mesolithic era and date back from 8 to 15,000 BC. The area of modern-day Lysychansk started having a more significant population during the late Copper and Bronze Ages, when pastoral herding became common along the river. It is thought that there were numerous burial kurgans in Lysychansk, although they have been mostly destroyed, except for an excavation of 13 of them in nearby Pryvillia. The site at Pryvillia has both Yamnaya and Srubnaya burials, alongside smaller numbers of Multi-cordoned ware culture and nomadic burials which contain bronze knives and cast bronze axes. There is also a separate excavation site at the Lysychansk Bread-Products Plant within the city that also found two kurgans. The most significant discovery in the area from the Bronze Age is in the city's southwestern edge, which was discovered in 2007 during an expedition by the East Ukrainian National University. The object is a Kurgan stelae, which was found in a kurgan, which was dated back to 2700-2600 BC and likely belonged to the early Catacomb culture. It is itself unusual because unlike the other stelae that have been found around Luhansk and the Pontic steppe, it does not have either human feet or the tree of life motif, but contains multiple examples of symbolism of solar events which led some researchers to interprit it as a depiction of a solar deity from the culture. There is one more settlement from the ancient period that are near Lysychansk: it is from the Bondarikha culture that was in the late Bronze to Iron Age. The region was then inhabited by steppe people, with materials from this period like barbed arrowheads that are most likely from the Scythian people being held in the local museum, and two stone statues that are Polovtsian in the former building of a school in the city.
Medieval era The next time the city was significantly recorded was during the medieval era, when it became part of the area ruled by the khanate of the Golden Horde. After the khanate declined, Vytautas the Great started leading expeditions in the area to conquer it as part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 1380s to 1390s, which is most evident by a fortification found dating to this period in Nyzhnie Teple (Nyzhnoteple rural hromada). After the Lithuanian influence also started to dwindle in the area, the city became a contested area between the Polish–Lithuanian union, the Grand Principality of Moscow, and the Crimean Khanate. There is a crossing point between Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk called the "Borivskyi ford" from this era, which was used as a route during raiding parties by the Tatars and for diplomacy between the Grand Principality of Moscow and the Crimean Khanate. There are also two more significant sites dating back to this period from the city: a fortification and Borivske. The fortification had existed from at least 1672 and is now at the site of the soda plant in the city, which was used by the Cossacks to monitor the Crimean Tatars along the route in the city at the ford. The second site, Borivske, was the earliest stable settlement in the city, established around 1675 by Don Cossacks loyal to the Tsardom of Russia. No settlement had existed permanently in the city prior to this date, mostly because of the raiding route running through the city. The settlement of Krasnianskyi, which is also located in the modern-day city, was founded later in 1678, also by Cossacks.
Cossack resettling
On 5 July 1710, another settlement was established in the area, known as Lisya Balka. The new settlement was also a Cossack settlement set up by Hetman of Ukraine, Ivan Skoropadsky, and was set up following a decree by Peter the Great that forcibly relocated them from Right-Bank Ukraine to Sloboda Ukraine in retaliation for the Cossack-led Bulavin Rebellion. Three kurins of Zaporozhian Cossacks, which consisted of 26 people, were resettled there which was confirmed by a document dated 14 December 1710 and also in a land-survey done in 1712. However, the three Cossack settlements were noted to be on the left bank of the Donets, not the right bank, to which modern-day Lysychansk would be. The village boundaries merely extended into the right bank theoretically, with the Cossacks only going to the right bank for foresty and hunting at the time, not as any proper human settlement. This was because any attempts to establish a human presence on the right bank were destroyed by either the Crimean Tatars or the Nogai raiders who had fled to the Crimean Khanate because they considered the land their own.
Imperial city Slavo-Serbia and Novorossiya Governorate
In 1721, the settlements in the city of modern-day Lysychansk started gaining some notoriety (which by this point consisted of Lisya Balka, Verkhnie, and Pryviln) after a survey discovered coal in the region. These were documented by Hryhorii Kapustin or Chirkov and Vepreisky. In order to confirm this discovery, a secondary survey was done in 1722, which again confirmed coal in the area. This was the first discovery of coal in the Donets Basin. In addition, alongside the deposit in Shakhty (now within Rostov Oblast, Russia), the two locations are where industrially viable coal deposits were first identified in the Russian Empire. Due to this, in 1723, the first large-scale coal extraction began in the area on the river by Captain Semyon Chirkov and administrator Mykyta Vepreisky. Under decrees established in March to April 1753, the area in which modern-day Lysychansk lies on the right bank would finally have proper settlements. This was done under Elizabeth of Russia, who settled two hussar regiments consisting to Balkan people in the region under Jovan Šević and Rajko Preradović in the region to form the new territory of the Russian Empire, Slavo-Serbia. The hussars founded three settlements in modern-day Lysychansk afterwards: the village of the Third Company (on the territory of Verkhnie) in 1754, the Fifth Company (on the territory of Pryvillia), and a private settlement on the outskirts of Rubizhne. The Third Company is the site on which most of Lysychansk is located, as the other two became satellite towns. By 1757, the total population of Verkhnie was 71. Just two decades later, and the population was 796, even though the Bakhmut Hussar Regiment was disbanded in the 1770s and the area became part of the Novorossiya Governorate following the abolishment of Slavo-Serbia. Despite life in the settlement not being great due to lack of medical care which led to rampant diseases, the population recorded over 1,000 by 1795.
Growth as a mining centre
In the late 1780s, Mykola Avramov, alongside members of the Black Sea Fleet returned to Verkhnie in order to investigate the settlement's mineral resources. Under Avramov, an expedition began in the area for extracting coal at four sites, which was reported by Rear Admiral Kaslivtsev in Mykolaiv to the government of Ivan Chernyshyov about possible governmental coal extraction. In 1795, this finally came into fruition, mainly driven by the Black Sea Fleet's need for fuel. This was the first time that coal extraction had begun in Imperial Russia since 1725, with the death of Peter the Great. The law that approved this was Catherine II's decree of 14 November 1795, which mandated that the first mine ever in the Donbas was to be established at area of Lisya Balka (which, by this time, referred not to the previous Cossack settlement but to the terrain) in the village of Verkhnie. It was incorporated in the decree as a subdivision of the foundry in Luhansk, and was specifically tasked to supply coal to this foundry and the Black Sea Fleet. The site in Lisya Balka was chosen by Charles Gascoigne, of the factory in Petrozavodsk, and is now considered the founder of Luhansk, because he deemed it shallow and gently dipping and best suited for mining, with the river close by for water transport. Skilled workers were brought in from Petrozavodsk and Lipetsk in modern-day Russia to help with the new mine.