Ashgabat vs Dnipro

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Ashgabat (Turkmen: Aşgabat; Ашгабат, pronounced [ɑʃʁɑˈbɑt], Persian: عشق آباد‎; Russian: Ашхабад), formerly named Poltoratsk (Russian: Полтора́цк, IPA: [pəltɐˈratsk]) between 1919 and 1927, is the capital and the largest city of Turkmenistan. It is situated between the Karakum Desert and the Kopet Dag mountain range in Central Asia. It is also near the Iran-Turkmenistan border. The city was founded in 1881 on the basis of an Ahal Teke tribal village, and made the capital of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924.

Much of the city was destroyed by the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake but has since been extensively rebuilt under the rule of Saparmurat Niyazov’s "White City" urban renewal project, resulting in monumental projects sheathed in costly white marble. The Soviet-era Karakum Canal runs through the city, carrying waters from the Amu Darya from east to west. Since 2019, the city has been recognized as having one of the highest costs of living in the world largely due to Turkmenistan's inflation and import issues.

Source: Wikipedia

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Dnipro (Ukrainian: Дніпро [d⁽ʲ⁾n⁽ʲ⁾iˈprɔ] (listen); Russian: Днепр, romanized: Dnepr [dʲnʲepr]), previously called Dnipropetrovsk (Ukrainian: Дніпропетро́вськ [ˌd⁽ʲ⁾n⁽ʲ⁾ipropeˈtrɔu̯sʲk]; Russian: Днепропетро́вск, romanized: Dnepropetrovsk [dʲnʲɪprəpʲɪˈtrofsk]) from 1926 until May 2016, is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the central-eastern part of Ukraine, 391 kilometres (243 mi) southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnieper River, after which it is named. Dnipro is the administrative centre of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Administratively, it is incorporated as a city of oblast significance, the centre of Dnipro municipality and extraterritorial administrative centre of Dnipro Raion. It has a population of 990,724 (2020 est.). Archeological findings suggest that the first fortified town in the territory of present-day Dnipro probably dates to the mid-16th century. Other findings suggest that the town Samar, now a neighborhood in Dnipro's Samarskyi District, existed in the 1520s.Known as Ekaterinoslav (Russian: Екатериносла́в, romanized: Yekaterinoslav [jɪkətʲɪrʲɪnɐˈsɫaf]; Ukrainian: Катериносла́в, romanized: Katerynoslav [kɐtɛrɪnoˈslɑu̯]) until 1925, the city was formally inaugurated by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great (Russian: Екатерина, romanized: Ekaterina - hence its then name) in 1787 as the administrative centre of the newly-acquired vast territories of imperial New Russia, including those ceded to Russia by the Ottoman Empire under the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774).

Grigory Potemkin originally envisioned the city as the Russian Empire's third capital city, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926, it became a vital industrial centre of Soviet Ukraine, one of the key centres of the nuclear, arms, and space industries of the Soviet Union. In particular, it is home to the Yuzhmash, a major space and ballistic-missile design bureau and manufacturer. Because of its military industry, it functioned as a closed city until the 1990s. On 19 May 2016, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada changed the official name of the city from Dnipropetrovsk to Dnipro.Dnipro is a powerhouse of Ukraine's business and politics and is the native city of many of the country's most important figures. Much of Ukrainian politics continues to be defined by the legacies of Leonid Kuchma, Pavlo Lazarenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, whose intermingled political careers started in Dnipropetrovsk.

Source: Wikipedia