Type 1.
After the coup d'etat of April 29–30, 1918, and the coming to power of Hetman P. Skoropadskyi, 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 Volodymyr.
It was impossible to do this centrally under the conditions of the civil war. Therefore, the application of overprints was carried out by local authorities simultaneously across all postal districts, using whatever technical means were available, often by hand. This led to great variety in the types and graphic execution of the overprints.
Research has identified 52 main types of tridents, 68 variants, and 13 printing errors—133 principal varieties in total. The overprints were produced 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 identified these forgeries.