Type 2.
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 significant stocks of such stamps. To use them and to prevent identical stamps from other regions from entering circulation—which would have harmed the Ukrainian treasury—on August 20, 1918, the Hetmanate Ministry of Posts ordered that the Ukrainian state emblem, the trident of St. Volodymyr, be overprinted on all available stocks of Russian stamps.
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 whatever technical means were available, often by hand. This led to great variety in the types and graphic appearance of the overprints.
Research identified 52 main types of tridents, 68 varieties, and 13 printing errors—a total of 133 principal variants. 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 counterfeiters abroad produced forgeries as well. They forged 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.