The settlement was founded in 1926 on the site of a settlement named Oleksiivka (). After
the 1986 accident at the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, 45 km far from Vilcha, the settlement was not included into the "
Exclusion Zone" before 1993. During 1993 to 1996, most of the 2,000 residents moved to
Kharkiv Oblast, where they founded a
new Vilcha (709 km away), a few kilometres south of the town of
Vovchansk. The ghost town, today one of the checkpoints to the Exclusion Zone, was resettled by a few
samosely some years later. On February 24, 2022, the
State Border Service of Ukraine claimed to be battling a column of Russian military vehicles at the border crossing with
Belarus, near Vilcha. From February to April 2022, Vilcha was
occupied by Russia as a result of the
2022 invasion. ==Geography==