Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Dnieper is approximately 2,200 kilometres long, making it the fourth-longest river in Europe after the Volga, Danube, and Ural. It rises in the Valdai Hills in Russia, flows through Belarus, and continues through Ukraine before emptying into the Black Sea. Of its total length, about 485 kilometres lie within Russia, 700 kilometres within Belarus, and 1,095 kilometres within Ukraine.
The name Dnieper descends from the Old East Slavic Duneprŭ, which scholars connect to either the Sarmatian Danu Apara, meaning "Farther River", or the Scythian Danu Apr, meaning "Deep River". The ancient Greek name Borysthenes, used by Herodotus, derived from Scythian words meaning either "yellow place" or "place of beavers". The Huns called the river Var, from the Scythian Varu, meaning "Broad".
The Dnieper Rapids, a key obstacle on the Viking-era trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks, were inundated when the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station was completed in 1932. The rising waters of the Dnieper Reservoir submerged the nine major cataracts and dozens of smaller rapids. Before that, traders had to portage their ships around seven of the rapids while guarding against Pecheneg nomads.
Six dam-and-reservoir systems built along the river between the mouth of the Pripyat and the former Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station collectively produce 10% of Ukraine's electricity. The first was the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station near Zaporizhzhia, built between 1927 and 1932 with an output of 558 megawatts, later rebuilt to 750 megawatts after its destruction in World War II. The Kakhovka dam, the southernmost of the six, was destroyed by Russian forces on the 6th of June 2023.
The 1986 Chernobyl disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, which sits beside the Pripyat River just upstream from where the Pripyat joins the Dnieper. The city of Slavutych, founded after the disaster in 1986 to house displaced workers, takes its name from a Ukrainian poetic term for the Dnieper. The Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant near Kamianske also lies close to the river, with its radioactive dumps posing an ongoing contamination risk.
Nikolai Gogol described the Dnieper in chapter X of his 1831 story A Terrible Vengeance, a passage considered a classical example of nature writing in Russian literature. Taras Shevchenko also wrote about the river. The Soviet composer Mark Fradkin wrote Song of the Dnieper in 1941 to words by Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky. The folk metal band Turisas included a track called The Dnieper Rapids on their 2007 album The Varangian Way.