Balfour on the Ukrainian treaty

On 20 February 1918 the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, informed the Polish National Committee that Britain did not accept the treaty which the Central Powers had concluded at Brest-Litovsk with the Ukrainian People’s Republic. This date and content are given by the British official chronology of the war, published in 1922. Some Polish works date this British statement to 18 February and summarise it briefly: “we do not recognise the Brest agreements”. It was conveyed to representatives of the Committee, which had its seat in Paris. For the Poles it meant that Britain would also not recognise the transfer to Ukraine of lands they regarded as Polish, above all the Chełm Land.

The answer to the “fourth partition”

The peace with Ukraine, signed on 9 February, drew its border far to the west of the Bug and gave the new state the former Governorate of Chełm with part of Podlasie. In the Kingdom of Poland and in Galicia this was seen as a new partition. Jan Kucharzewski’s government resigned, the Regency Council issued a proclamation of protest, a wave of strikes and demonstrations swept the country, and on the night of 15–16 February the II Brigade of the Polish Legions broke through at Rarańcza to the Russian side. For Roman Dmowski’s Committee, which had staked everything on an Entente victory from the start, this was an opportunity to show Poles at home that the Central Powers had failed them and that the Western powers were on their side.

The British declaration followed from earlier steps taken by London. In October 1917 Britain had recognised the Committee as an official Polish organisation. On 5 January 1918 Prime Minister David Lloyd George included among Britain’s war aims an independent Poland comprising all the genuinely Polish lands whose inhabitants wished to belong to it. A treaty concluded without the participation of Poles, which handed districts with a Polish and Catholic majority to a foreign state, contradicted this principle. London had not formally recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic either, and in the eyes of the Allies Kiev’s separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary was aid to the enemy, because Ukrainian grain was meant to soften the effects of the blockade.

Significance

The statement cost the British nothing, since they had no influence over what was happening at Brest and in Ukraine. For the Committee, however, it was valuable as proof that on the question of Poland’s eastern borders the Western powers listened to its voice, and not to that of Berlin and Vienna.

Other Allies soon took a similar position. On 8 March the French ambassador in Washington presented to the Americans the draft of a joint declaration in which the Allies would declare “null and void” treaties imposed by force that gave Ukraine or the Central Powers lands “indisputably Polish” in ethnographic and historical terms. The United States agreed to join it. The matter came to fruition in June: on 3 June 1918 the United Kingdom, France and Italy issued at Versailles a declaration (PL) that the creation of a united and independent Poland with access to the sea was one of the conditions of a just and lasting peace.