End of the Polish–Ukrainian war

In mid-July 1919 the last units of the Ukrainian Galician Army crossed the border river Zbruch into the lands of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Polish historian Aleksandra Leinwand writes that on 17 July all fighting ceased on the Polish–Ukrainian front. So ended the Polish–Ukrainian war, which had begun during the night of 31 October–1 November 1918 with the fighting for Lviv. The whole of Eastern Galicia up to the Zbruch was in Polish hands, although the powers still regarded this only as a provisional administration.

The counter-offensive

In June the Ukrainians had nearly reversed the fortunes of the war. The Chortkiv offensive brought their army to about 40 kilometres from Lviv, but it ran out of ammunition. The Polish command meanwhile gathered reinforcements, among them the 1st Rifle Division of Haller’s army, and on 25 June the powers agreed to its use in Galicia. On 28 June the Poles went over to the counter-offensive. For the first three days Józef Piłsudski commanded the attack in person. The Poles broke the front at Janczyn and moved east, and their superiority in cavalry allowed them to wage a war of manoeuvre in which the Ukrainians, short of ammunition, could not keep up.

On 4 July the dictator of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, Yevhen Petrushevych, dismissed the commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Hrekov (PL), and the decision was taken to withdraw the army beyond the Zbruch. On 5 July the Poles reached the Strypa, and on 15 July they took Tarnopol and the area along the Seret. In these days the Ukrainian authorities were also officially notified of the decision of the Paris conference placing Eastern Galicia under Polish administration.

Beyond the Zbruch

The retreat was not a rout. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Galician Army then numbered about 80,000 men, 36,000 of them at the front, and crossed the Zbruch on 16–18 July with its fighting capacity intact. Studies differ on the date. The Polish Wikipedia gives 16 July, Artur Brożyniak of the IPN writes that most units had withdrawn by 17 July, and Leinwand regards that very day as the end of the war. With the army went the government of the republic, which stopped at Kamianets-Podilskyi, officials and, according to Polish studies, about 100,000 civilian refugees. Some officials and soldiers went into exile in Czechoslovakia.

Beyond the Zbruch the Galician Army joined the forces of Symon Petliura and went on to fight both the Red Army and the White Volunteer Army. As early as 25 July one of its corps set off for the anti-Bolshevik front, and in August the Galicians took part in the march on Kyiv (PL) together with Petliura’s army.

After the war

The war for Eastern Galicia had lasted eight and a half months. For the Poles it was above all a struggle for Lviv, whose defence in November 1918 had become a legend; for the Ukrainians it was a lost struggle for a state of their own on lands where they formed the majority of the population. The war was brutal, and the crimes of Ukrainian troops against prisoners and the Polish civilian population were later investigated by a commission of the Sejm. In the occupied lands the Polish authorities interned thousands of soldiers of the Galician Army and Ukrainian activists in camps.

The question of the country’s allegiance remained open. The powers regarded Eastern Galicia as disputed territory, and Poland governed it as a provisional administrator. In December 1919 a delegation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic recognised the Zbruch as the border river in Warsaw. The Conference of Ambassadors granted Poland sovereignty over Eastern Galicia only in March 1923, and at that point Petrushevych’s government in exile in Vienna dissolved itself.