Type 1.
After the coup d'etat of April 29–30, 1918 and the coming to power of Hetman P. Skoropadsky, the People's Republic was abolished, and Ukraine was proclaimed the Ukrainian State. The Ukrainian postal administration had substantial stocks of such stamps. To use them and to prevent stamps of the same type from entering from other regions—which would have harmed the Ukrainian treasury—on August 20, 1918 the hetmanate Ministry of Posts ordered that all available stocks of Russian stamps be overprinted with the Ukrainian state coat of arms, the trident of Saint Vladimir.
It was impossible to do this centrally under civil-war conditions. Therefore, the overprints were applied by local authorities simultaneously in all postal districts, using available technical means, often by hand. This led to great variety in the types and graphic execution of the overprints.
Research identified 52 main trident types, 68 varieties, and 13 printing errors—133 principal varieties in total. Overprints were made in six postal districts: Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Odesa, and Podillia.
Ukrainian provisional postage stamps began to be forged as early as late 1918 in southern Ukraine, and later forgeries were produced by speculators abroad. They counterfeited overprints and postal cancellations and even created non-existent denominations, so-called “fantasy” issues. The Union of Philatelists of Ukraine in Germany successfully detected these forgeries.