Germans take Poltava

On 29 March 1918 the Bolsheviks lost Poltava, a provincial capital on the railway from Kiev to Kharkov. Units of the Ukrainian Zaporozhian Division and German troops entered the town on the Vorskla. Poltava had been in Red hands since 19–20 January, when it was taken by the troops of Mikhail Muravyov marching on Kiev. After the fall of Kiev in February, as the Germans approached from the west, it was in Poltava that the leaders of Soviet Ukraine sought refuge.

The march east

After the capture of Kiev at the beginning of March, the Germans and the units of the Ukrainian People’s Republic moved on to the left bank of the Dnieper, along the railway lines leading to Poltava, Kharkov and Yekaterinoslav. The Separate Zaporozhian Detachment, renamed the Zaporozhian Division after entering Kiev, fought the Bolsheviks in mid-March for the stations of Yahotyn and Hrebinka and for Lubny. In their retreat the Bolsheviks destroyed bridges and track, but they could not stop an opponent who had a regular army on his side.

At the end of March the division was commanded by Oleksandr Natiiv (PL). According to Ukrainian accounts, its regiments approached Poltava from the south through ravines during the night of 28–29 March, and on the morning of 29 March the batteries opened fire on the station, after which the infantry went into the attack. The Bolsheviks blew up the bridges over the Vorskla but did not hold the town. German units struck from the east. By the end of the same day Poltava was in the hands of the allies.

Before Kharkov

The capture of Poltava opened the road to Kharkov, the main centre of Soviet power in Ukraine. German and Ukrainian troops entered it on 7–8 April, according to different sources, and over the following weeks the Central Powers occupied the whole of Ukraine, including the Donbas and the Crimea. Poltava fell within the German zone, defined in agreement with Austria-Hungary at the end of March.

For the Ukrainians the March fighting was an opportunity to show that their state had an army of its own. It did not bring full independence. German divisions were decisive, and the Germans had come above all for grain. Requisitions soon began, and with them grew the peasants’ resistance to the occupiers and to the government that had brought them in.