Sloboda Ukraine (literally: Borderland of free frontier guards; ; ), or Slobozhanshchyna (, ; , ), is a historical region, now located in Northeastern Ukraine and Southwestern Russia. It developed and flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries on the southwestern frontier of the Tsardom of Russia. In 1765, it was converted into the Sloboda Ukraine Governorate. Etymology The name derives from the term sloboda for a colonial settlement free of tax obligations, and the word ukraine in its original sense of "borderland". The etymology of the word Ukraine is seen this way among Russian, Ukrainian and Western historians such as Orest Subtelny, Paul Magocsi, Omeljan Pritsak, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, Ivan Ohiyenko, Petro Tolochko and others. It is supported by the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and the Etymological dictionary of the Ukrainian language. Geographical extent The territory of historic Sloboda Ukraine corresponds to the territory of the present-day Ukrainian oblast (province) of Kharkiv (in its entirety), and parts of the Sumy, Donetsk, and Luhansk Oblasts, as well as parts of the Belgorod, Kursk, and Voronezh Oblasts of Russia. History Russia gained control over the territory as the result of conquests against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the Muscovite–Lithuanian Wars in the 16th century. According to Russian and Ukrainian sources of the 16th-17th centuries, the region was initially part of the Russian state, which encouraged the settlement of this territory for defensive purposes. It was first colonised by the Russians in the first half of the 16th century and became part of a defense line used against Tatar raiding. A second wave of colonisation came in the 1620–1630s, largely in the form of Ukrainian Cossack regiments, who were allowed to settle there in order to help protect the territory against the Tatars. The Cossacks who arrived in Sloboda Ukraine were under the sovereignty of Russian tsars and their military chancellery and were registered in Russian military service. A great number of Ukrainian refugees arrived from Poland-Lithuania after the rebellion of 1637-1638 and received generous resettlement subsidies from the Russian government. For decades, Ukrainian cossacks were crossing the border into southern Russia to gather livestock, but many of them were also entering for banditry, so that Russia had to build a new garrison town on the Boguchar River in an attempt to defend the land from Ukrainian bands and resettled many of the Ukrainian refugees at Valuyki, Korocha, Voronezh and as far as