After the coup d'etat of April 29-30, 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 substantial stocks of such stamps. In order 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 decided to overprint the Ukrainian state emblem, the trident of St. Volodymyr, on all available stocks of Russian stamps.
It was impossible to do this centrally under civil-war conditions. Therefore, the application of overprints was carried out by local authorities simultaneously in all postal districts, using the available technical means, often by hand. This led to a great variety of overprint types and graphic styles.
Research identified 52 main trident types, 68 variants, 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 counterfeited as early as late 1918 in Southern Ukraine, and later forgeries were produced by speculators abroad. 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.