The Origins of Polish-Ukrainian Conflict: Józef Piłsudski, Russia, West Ukraine, and Greater Poland (November 1918−January 1919)
The Polish head of state, saw East Ukraine with Kiev to be the key subject to the question of the Russian future and, therefore, to Poland too. He took into consideration several important facts regarding Ukraine as its geopolitical position, economic potential including the production of grain, coal, salt, iron ore, or steel, and finally its huge population number which was at that time around 30 million people [...]
At the very beginning, it must be noticed that before the outbreak of WWI in the summer of 1914 it was not both either Poland or Ukraine as the state on the political map of Europe. Poland was considered a historical region while Ukraine was a geographical one. Poland was divided at the end of the 18th century between three powerful neighbors – the Kingdom of Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire while the present-day territory of Ukraine between the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria, Austria-Hungary) which took its western part including Lvov (Lemberg/Lwów) and the Russian Empire possessing its eastern and central portions including Kiev. However, the biggest portions of historical Poland and geographic Ukraine were governed by Russia from 1795 up to 1917.
For the reason to change a such geopolitical situation, it was created before WWI an idea of political cooperation between the Poles and the Ukrainians for the sake to fight for independence. Nevertheless, behind this idea was the project of reborn Great Poland within its historical boundaries (before the three partitions of Poland-Lithuania in 1772, 1793, and 1795). The Polish state was re-established on November 11th, 1918 but at that time the Poles and the Ukrainians were already fighting with each other over the land and the borders. On the same day, Józef Piłsudski (born near Vilnius in Lithuania/Litwa in 1867) became appointed by the Governing Council of Poland (in fact, the government) to the position of the head of state with dictatorial authority (“Naczelnik”).[i] His first duty was to create the government of the just re-established independent state of Poland. He was the leader of Poland till 1922 and from 1926 to 1935 when he died. During his governing of Poland, the Polish foreign policy, especially toward Soviet Russia/USSR, Lithuania, and Ukraine depended on his designs and political decisions. He wanted to realize the idea of re-born independent Poland during WWI as saw wartime as a great opportunity to re-establish the borders of historical Poland (those borders were established on the east at the very expense of Eastern Slavs, primarily Russians, and Russia). However, to do that, the precondition was the dismissal of the three empires: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Only on the ruins of all three of them, the borders of historical Poland could be re-created. Nevertheless, at the very end of the war, it became obvious that Lithuanians and Ukrainians would not support this idea and his designs concerning historical Poland as in this case both of them had to be included in Poland but not be independent. The greatest part of this idea could be realized by the collapse of Russia during the war (as the biggest portion of historical Poland was included in Russia) and, therefore, J. Piłsudski supported the Russian defeat by Germany and Austria-Hungary. For that reason, since 1908 he was forming Polish legions which had to fight on the side of the Central Powers against the Russian Empire on the Eastern Front.
The Bolshevik anti-Russian revolution in October/November 1917 followed by the 1917−1922 Russian Civil War offered new political possibilities to several nations to get either formal independence or autonomy within post-revolutionary Russia (in fact, the USSR). That was exactly an idea that was promulgated by Józef Piłsudski for the last two decades.
Nevertheless, from the very beginning of WWI, the Polish question was put within the geopolitical designs of the German Second Reich (1871−1918) which meant in the practice that the Polish patriots and nationalists have been only observers without a real political and military power to change the political map of Central and East Europe to their national favor. Up to the very end of WWI, in other words, they could just silently observe the changes that occurred in this part of Europe including the Bolshevik red revolution, the Russian civil war between the Reds and the Whites, and finally, the military occupation of present-day West Ukraine by the Central Powers.
Józef Piłsudski himself became arrested by the Germans in the summer of 1917 (being in the German prison in Magdeburg till November 1918) for the very reason he did not want to put his military detachments (legions) under the German supreme command. He became free when the Russian Empire already collapsed due to the pro-German Bolshevik revolution. In the meantime, on November 11th, 1918 Poland proclaimed its national-political independence but without clear and internationally agreed state borderlands especially in the east (conflict with the Bolshevik Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine). From the time of the beginning of the Russian civil war in November 1917 up to the end of WWI, there were a number of nations who proclaimed their national-political independence including Poland as well (From Finland to Azerbaijan).
The Polish head of state, saw East Ukraine with Kiev to be the key subject to the question of the Russian future and, therefore, to Poland too. He took into consideration several important facts regarding Ukraine as its geopolitical position, economic potential including the production of grain, coal, salt, iron ore, or steel, and finally its huge population number which was at that time around 30 million people. All of these factors have been taken into consideration as Ukraine was a natural ally of Poland against the Russian Empire or any form of Russia including a Bolshevik one as a successor of the Russian Empire.
That was a time (November 1918) when self-proclaimed the so-called Ukrainian People’s Republic (the UPR), in fact, present-day East Ukraine, was fighting to survive against the Bolshevik Red Army as V. I. Lenin did not want to recognize any kind of Ukrainian independence but rather autonomy within Bolshevik Russia (later the USSR). The same policy intentions he had regarding all other ex-Russian territories that had proclaimed independence from the Russian Empire in 1917 and 1918, including Poland as well. For that purpose, Lenin’s Bolsheviks organized a political attempt in November 1918 to take power in Poland which ultimately collapsed. Nevertheless, it was a clear signal for the new Polish authorities in Warsaw that Lenin’s Bolsheviks are the enemies of Polish independence and Polish geopolitical projections in East Europe including parts of present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania (or in other words, former historic Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania according to the 1569 Union of Lublin). Nevertheless, a new Bolshevik government in St. Petersburg started to militarily occupy land claimed by Warsaw and to bolshevizied it which became the casus belli for the 1918−1920 Polish-Bolshevik War.
To have a better position in the fight against the Bolsheviks, J. Piłsudski sent to Kiev at the end of November 1918 a special diplomatic mission which had the prime task to discuss with the new Ukrainian authorities all possibilities concerning Polish-Ukrainian military cooperation. For the same purpose, in January 1919 it was sent to Warsaw the Ukrainian delegation from Kiev in order to discuss all practical problems regarding the making of the Polish-Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik military coalition. But in the practice, at that time, at least for the Polish side, such military alliance became, in fact, not so relevant as Poland did not have armed forces which could substantially help the UPR against the Red Army. For instance, when WWI was over, the Polish army numbered only some 6.000 soldiers, although their number was growing progressively. For example, in two months, the Polish army had around 110.000 volunteer soldiers and officers but they have not been able to successfully participate in any serious military action at least until the spring of 1919. Nonetheless, it became the truth that the Polish army had to be engaged in the first serious military campaigns exactly against Ukrainian forces over the territory of East Galicia, and, therefore, Polish negotiations with the Ukrainian side became broken off already in January 1919.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Ex-University Professor
Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies
[i] Joseph Klemens Piłsudski was born on December 5th in 1867 and died on May 12the in 1935. He was born near Vilnius (Litwa) at that time part of the Russian Empire (the so-called “Russian Poland”). He was studying at the Kharkov University and became one of the chief agitators for the Polish Socialist Party (the PSP) since 1893. However, his focal political orientation and aim was to gain an independence for Poland primarily from Russia, but if possible, within the historical borders of Poland as they existed before 1795 (the Third Partition of Poland-Lithuania). For his anti-Russian activities, J. Piłsudski was in 1887 exiled to Siberia. In 1892 he returned to Poland and founded underground propaganda newspaper to agitate for the independence of Poland. In 1914 after the start of WWI he organized Polish volunteer detachments to join the army of Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front to fight Russia. After the Russian February Revolution in 1917, he required from Germany to guarantee the ultimate independence of Poland but when the German authority rejected the requirement J. Piłsudski stopped to support Berlin. As a consequence, he was interned in 1917−1918. In newly independent Poland he became head of state in 1918−1922 and Chief of Staff of the Polish Army in 1918−1923. During the Polish-Russian War after WWI, J. Piłsudski succeeded to expend the eastern borders of Poland at the expense of Bolshevik Russia. In 1926, he organized and lead an army putsch and dissolved Parliament. Until his death he was Minister of War and general inspector of the armed forces but failed to modernize both the army and economy.
Recently, the West and the Middle East pundits and analysts have been trying to analyze the provisions of the new draft constitution proposed by the Russian side as a solution to the Syrian conflict.Naturally, analyzing the provisions, any of the sides involved in the conflict is trying to present itself as the legitimate government. That raises the question of whether to adopt such a draft or not, because a newly appointed government would have to comply with a new constitution. Not surprisingly, not only the moderate opposition and illegal armed groups, but the official Syrian authorities as well subject the ...
Read the opinion by Noam Chomsky about POTUS (Presidents of USA) after the Second World War in the light of the Nuremberg laws.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation. DWN says: “The Russian secret services have apparently thoroughly studied the paper. In advance of the paper’s publication, a harsh note of protest has been sent to Berlin: The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message: ‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an ...
Stepan Bandera is considered as a national hero in Ukraine, with many Ukrainians praising him and his deeds as a fighter for Ukraine's independence and freedom before, during and after WW2. Yet his real history shows there is nothing praiseworthy about the man, or what he strove for. As a young man who was a fervent Ukrainian nationalist he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists OUN in 1929. The OUN was a ultra nationalist fascist organization that accepted violence as a political tool against foreign and domestic enemies of their cause. Bandera quickly rose in the OUN ranks and ...
The Albanian nationhood as understood in the 19th century was part of a romanticist notion of nationality, i.e., the Albanians were the Balkan people whose mother tongue was Albanian regardless of any confessional division of Albanian people into three denominations (Moslem, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox). Within the north Albanian tribes, especially among the Miriditi, the Roman Catholic Church was very influential. The Roman Catholic Church became the main protector of the Albanian language and cultural heritage and the main protagonist of the national identity of the Albanians in Northern Albania.[1] The expression of common notions of the Albanian nationhood ...
As recounted in the unjustly neglected German television report “It Began with a Lie,” in April 1999, in the midst of NATO’s illegal bombing campaign against what had remained of Yugoslavia, then German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping repeatedly accused the Serbian side of installing a Nazi-style “concentration camp” in the soccer stadium in Pristina, the capital of Serbia’s Kosovo and Metohija province. Pressed by the media for proof, Scharping offered “witness testimony” – which he never subsequently produced.A month earlier, just as the bombing had started, Scharping stated that “we never would have taken military action if there weren’t this ...
As 2016 closes, we find ourselves a deeply unsettled nation. We’re unable to draw the lines of our national interest. Is it jobs and economy, is it national security, or is it now in our interest to ensure global security — in other words, act as the world’s policemen?As the “failing” (to quote Trump) New York Times degenerates into a Washington Post organization with its stagnant Cold War vision of a 1950s world where the Russians are to blame for most everything — Hillary’s loss, most of the aggression and disorder in the world, the desire to destabilize Europe, etc. — the Times has added the ...
Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century.If not stopped, it will be a short century.Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s ...
Claiming that Macedonians voluntarily chose to rename our country into “North Macedonia” and ethnicity into “North Macedonians” is like saying that Indigenous groups choose to be called “Redskins”. And when Western media attack Macedonians for denouncing the forced name change, it would be akin to them attacking Indigenous groups for denouncing anti-Indigenous terms.Welcome to The Surreal World: Macedonia.Yes, Macedonians get attacked for denouncing the derogatory terms used against us. Why? Because the United States says so. And they fund media and so-called “think tanks” to do the same. These same groups accuse Macedonians of the exact tactics that are being ...
They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have ...
The Kingdom of Belgium as a multilingual and multicultural society is today a federal type of experimental laboratory of European integration within the framework of the European Union (the EU). This is also a country in which the capital of the European Union is located and a country as one of the original six establishing countries of the present day the EU. The question of the destiny of the Belgian multicultural federalism is of crucial importance for the future process of European integration or disintegration.The Belgian multicultural society: Long united and long dividedThe population of the Kingdom of Belgium is ...
Jomo Kenyatta (c. 1891 – 22 August 1978) was a Kenyan politician and the first President of Kenya. Kenyatta was the leader of Kenya from independence in 1963 to his death in 1978, serving first as Prime Minister (1963–64) and then as President (1964–78). He is considered the founding father of the Kenyan nation. Kenyatta was a well-educated intellectual who authored several books, and is remembered as a Pan-Africanist. He is also the father of Kenya's fourth and current President, Uhuru Kenyatta (Source: Wikipedia)Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate ...
The great deception of “a real democracy” in the Ukraine, which the New York Times insisted on 31 March 2019, shows little sign of relenting. For five years, Western populations have been consistently misled through skewed and slanted reporting, assuring the readership that what is unfolding in Kiev is a “fledgling democracy”, as a Washington Post editorial further outlined on 6 April 2019.In reality it was a United States-funded coup d’état. During the months prior to Viktor Yanukovych‘s February 2014 ousting, elite American organizations bankrolled the “anti-government protests”, revealed as much in December 2013 by Victoria Nuland, then a high ...
While all eyes have been on the U.S. presidential campaign, such foreign-policy hot spots as Syria, Iran and Pakistan, and the increasingly frosty relations between the United States and China, a simmering problem in the Balkans threatens to come to a boil. The most serious clashes to date involving angry Serb inhabitants of the northern portion of Kosovo and international Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping personnel erupted on November 28. Thirty German and Austrian soldiers were injured, some by small-arms fire and Molotov cocktails, when KFOR troops tried to remove roadblocks that Serb residents had erected. Those barricades have been the most ...
Remember watching ancient Orthodox Christian monasteries in flames in Kosovo dozen times.Old, noble constructions, spiritual and historical testimonies of past times.I also remember that majority of Orthodox Christian monasteries, churches and relics has been attacked and destroyed after NATO forces (officially: KFOR) took full control of the Serbian province.It amazed me to see how Western soldiers, under full equipment and heavy armament, often didn’t make a single move to stop Albanian violence; over 200 000 Serbs had to flee, in order to save their bare lives, bearing whole their lives in few suitcases if they were lucky enough.It turned out ...
Video documentary movie on the first ISIS in Europe in the Islamic Caliphate of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1995.This movie is made by the British SKY NEWS after the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.Similar documentary movies on the ISIS Bosnia-Herzegovina made by the Bosnian Serbs were never shown to the Western audience.The duration of the movie is 8 min. and 17 sec.In the movie are presented and future Al-Qaeda Mujahedeen holy fighters.From the movie is clear what was the real nature of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s.All copyrights reserved by the SKY NEWS.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, ...
Right now the US mainstream media is obsessing over Donald’s alleged womanizing and female groping soap opera as the Clinton’s/MSM’s pruriently entertaining smokescreen, neatly designed to cover up Hillary/Bill’s serial raping and her criminal lead role as enabler/strong armed intimidator of past victims.Meanwhile, barely noticed in a virtual media blackout in the West are at least a half dozen high alert, significant international developments this last weekend that all strongly indicate the extreme danger of a nuclear war breaking out at any time against Russia and its Eastern alliance. Again, do not pay attention to the US deceivers behind their Oz-like curtain ...
“Russia suspected of election scheme. U.S. probes plan to sow voter distrust.”That’s the Washington Post page-one lead headline of September 6. Think about it. The election that Americans are suffering through, cringing in embarrassment, making them think of moving abroad, renouncing their citizenship; an election causing the Founding Fathers to throw up as they turn in their graves … this is because the Russian Devils are sowing voter distrust! Who knew?But of course, that’s the way Commies are – Oh wait, I forgot, they’re no longer Commies. So what are they? Ah yes, they still have that awful old hangup so worthy ...
Serbia today is a member-State of United Nations (U.N.), after the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was split into several nations during the early 1990’s when war broke out between Serbian General Milosevic and neighboring nations. After partition, Serbia is still the most powerful “state” of the former Yugoslavia.“Kosovo”, the term used for the territory of southern Serbia, is de-jure recognised as a “state” by over 110+ “states”, but is not a “state” itself, as per the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), and is not a “state” at the U.N. where 2/3rd positive vote is ...
August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day, will see a ceremony introducing the country's new official army salute, as prescribed by Ukraine’s Presidential decree: Glory to Ukraine! - Glory to the Heroes!"We have consulted with the Minister of Defense, National Security and Defense Council, Government and I have decided that starting from August 24 these words will be heard for the first time as part of the official military parade ceremony on the Independence Day of Ukraine," Petro Poroshenko was quoted saying on the Ukraine President's official site.Glory to Ukraine! - Glory to the Heroes! is a slogan of the UPA, the ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
