After the coup d'etat of 29–30 April 1918 and the rise to power of Hetman P. Skoropadskyi, the People's Republic was abolished, and Ukraine was proclaimed the Ukrainian State. The Ukrainian postal administration had significant stocks of such stamps. In order to use them and prevent the inflow from other regions of similar stamps—which would have harmed the Ukrainian treasury—on 20 August 1918 the Hetmanate Ministry of Posts decreed that the Ukrainian state coat of arms, the trident of Saint Volodymyr, be overprinted on all available stocks of Russian stamps.
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 the available technical means, often by hand. This resulted in a great variety of overprint types and graphic designs.
Research identified 52 basic trident types, 68 variants, and 13 printing errors—a total of 133 principal varieties. The 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 the 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.