Start of the Kiev offensive

On 25 April 1920 Polish troops, with units of the Ukrainian People’s Republic at their side, attacked the Red Army along the whole front from the Pripyat to the Romanian border on the Dniester. So began the Kiev offensive, which Józef Piłsudski commanded in person. Its aim was to destroy the Soviet armies in right-bank Ukraine and to install in Kiev the government of Symon Petliura, with whom Poland had concluded an alliance four days earlier. The military convention was signed on the eve of the offensive, 24 April.

Plan and forces

Piłsudski expected that once they had beaten the Whites, the Bolsheviks would throw all their forces against Poland. Since the beginning of the year the Red Army had been bringing more and more divisions to the Polish front, and on 10 March its commander-in-chief, Sergei Kamenev (PL), approved a plan for an attack westwards. Piłsudski wanted to forestall it. In Ukraine the enemy was weaker than in Belarus: the South-Western Front (PL) of Alexander Yegorov (PL) had the 12th and 14th Armies here, while its 13th Army stood in the south facing the Whites in the Crimea. According to Russian accounts the Poles had almost threefold superiority on the main axis.

According to the IPN about 60,000 Polish soldiers went into the attack. The front was divided into sectors. From the Romanian border to Proskurov (PL) the Sixth Army was commanded by General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz, from Proskurov to Polonne the Second Army by General Antoni Listowski (PL), from Polonne to Olevsk the Third Army by General Edward Rydz-Śmigły, and further north, as far as Mozyr (PL), the group of Colonel Józef Rybak. The Ukrainians had managed to raise two incomplete divisions in Poland. Their presence alongside the Poles was, as the IPN historian Mirosław Szumiło writes, mainly of propaganda value.

Three days of attack

The Polish attack took the enemy by surprise. On 26 April, after a cavalry raid, the Poles took Zhytomyr. On 27 April the infantry entered Berdychiv, and the 1st Cavalry Division seized the railway junction of Koziatyn (PL), where a huge stock of rolling stock fell into its hands. In the south the Sixth Army took Vinnytsia (PL), Bar and Zhmerynka; in the north Polish troops took Chernobyl (PL), then an important river port, and reached the Dnieper at the mouth of the Pripyat. On 28 April a brigade made up of Ukrainians serving in the Red Army was routed near Koziatyn. According to Polish and Russian accounts the Poles took about 25,000 prisoners and 120 guns in these days.

The strategic aim was not achieved. The Soviet 12th Army was scattered but not destroyed, because some of its units had begun to fall back eastwards even before the Polish attack. Outside Kiev the enemy refused battle and withdrew beyond the Dnieper.

Proclamation to the Ukrainians

On 26 April Piłsudski issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Ukraine. In it he assured them that the Polish troops would drive the foreign invaders from the lands inhabited by the Ukrainian people and “will remain in Ukraine for the time necessary for a lawful Ukrainian government to take power over these lands”. Together with them, he wrote, the troops of Otaman Petliura were returning to Ukraine, troops which in Poland “had found shelter and help in the hardest days of trial”. Petliura for his part stressed the permanence of the alliance with Poland.

The Ukrainian population received the advancing troops with reserve. The country had been ruined by years of war and requisitions, and many peasants feared the return of Polish landowners. In Poland itself the expedition also had opponents, above all in the nationalist camp. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, as some historians note, were able to present themselves to the world as the side under attack. On 29 April Mikhail Tukhachevsky became commander of the Soviet Western Front in Belarus.