What was the Polish-Ukrainian War?
The Polish-Ukrainian War (1 November 1918 to 17 July 1919) was fought between Poland and the West Ukrainian People's Republic for Lwów and Eastern Galicia after Austria-Hungary collapsed. Poland won: by mid-July 1919 its army had driven the Ukrainian Galician Army across the Zbruch River, and in March 1923 the Allies recognized Polish rule.2
The war began in a single city and ended on the Zbruch River, the old border between Austria and Russia. The street fighting of November 1918 is told in more detail in our article on the defense of Lwów, and the wider story in our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921. The war was one of the battles that won Polish independence, fought while the Greater Poland Uprising raged in the west and just before the Polish-Soviet War, and its outcome was shaped by Józef Piłsudski and by the army of Józef Haller.
Why Poles and Ukrainians fought over Eastern Galicia
Eastern Galicia, the eastern half of the Austrian crownland of Galicia, was claimed by two nations. Ukrainians, then often called Ruthenians, were the majority in the countryside, but in Lwów (Lviv to Ukrainians, Lemberg to the Austrians) and most towns they were outnumbered by Poles and Jews: by the 1910 figures the Polish Press Agency quotes, the city was 51 percent Polish, 28 percent Jewish and 19 percent Ukrainian.3
Each side read the land in its own way. The Lviv historian Roman Holyk describes a Ukrainian case resting on the medieval Galician-Volhynian state and on the villages, where Ukrainians were the majority: in November 1918 they believed they were ending the rule of a Polish minority over a Ukrainian majority. Galician Poles looked back to Casimir the Great and the old Commonwealth, and to the towns. The Polish historian Michał Klimecki adds that Polish politicians treated the division of Galicia as an invention of Ukrainian activists and in August 1918 obtained from Emperor Charles I a promise that the province would not be divided.4
Ukrainian leaders drew their own conclusion. When Charles I announced on 16 October 1918 that the empire would become a federation of its peoples, a Ukrainian National Council (Rada) met in Lwów and on 19 October proclaimed a Ukrainian state reaching west to the San River. Faced with the emperor's promise to the Poles, Klimecki notes, its leaders judged talks with them pointless and prepared to take power by force.5
1 November 1918: the November Uprising and the West Ukrainian republic
Before dawn on 1 November 1918, Ukrainian soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian garrison, organized by Captain Dmytro Vitovsky of the Sich Riflemen, occupied the public buildings and military posts of Lwów and raised the blue-and-yellow flag over the town hall. Across most of Eastern Galicia the National Council took power almost unopposed; only towns with many Poles, Przemyśl among them, resisted.6
On 9 November the National Council formed a government, the State Secretariat, and on 13 November a provisional basic law gave the state its name: the West Ukrainian People's Republic (Zakhidnoukrainska Narodna Respublika, ZUNR). It was led by Yevhen Petrushevych, the head of the National Council.7
For Ukrainians, Holyk writes, the flags raised over the towns marked a lawful transfer of power carried out in the name of the people; Galician Poles were shocked and soon saw the Ukrainians as a hostile outside force. Oksana Dudko of the Center for Urban History in Lviv notes that the two memories still center on different moments: 1 November, the November Uprising, for Ukrainians, and the defense of Lwów three weeks later for Poles.8
The battle for Lwów and the pogrom
Polish resistance began the same day under Captain Czesław Mączyński. Volunteers held the western districts for three weeks; the IPN counts about 6,000 of them, nearly 1,400 pupils and students. A relief force from Kraków retook Przemyśl on 11 November, and on 20 November a column under Lieutenant Colonel Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz reached Lwów. After a joint attack on 21 November, Colonel Hnat Stefaniv ordered the Ukrainian units out that night, and on 22 November the city was in Polish hands. Most Ukrainian historians, Mykola Lytvyn writes, regard the retreat as Stefaniv's mistake, though its aim was to save the core of the army from encirclement.9
The Polish victory was followed at once by violence against the city's Jews. The community had declared itself neutral and formed its own militia, its quarter lay behind the Ukrainian lines, and rumors that Jews had fired on Polish troops spread among the volunteers. From 22 November soldiers, men in uniforms they had no right to, and criminals looted and burned the Jewish quarter and set the synagogue on fire; order returned only on the morning of 24 November (the American mission dated the disorders 21 to 23 November). Dudko notes that Ukrainian districts were also attacked.10
The death toll depends on who counted: 64 Jews killed by the count of the American mission led by Henry Morgenthau; 73 dead and 443 wounded by that of the Jewish Rescue Committee, the figures Wacław Wierzbieniec uses in his study of its work; 50 by the Polish government's commission of inquiry under Judge Zygmunt Rymowicz; at least 150 by delegates of the Polish foreign ministry; and almost 100 in the YIVO Encyclopedia.11
The pogrom became an international affair. Klimecki notes that reports of anti-Jewish violence weakened the Polish case at the peace conference, and the Ukrainian historians Yevhen Lyzen, Volodymyr Komar and Ihor Soliar record that the first Entente mission sent to Galicia was asked, among other things, to investigate it.12
The siege of Lwów and the Ukrainian Galician Army
Losing Lwów did not end the war. The Ukrainians held most of Eastern Galicia, laid siege to the city along a front of some 300 kilometers, and shelled its center; until the end of April 1919 Lwów stayed surrounded. Ukrainian assaults on the city in December and January failed.13
In those months the Ukrainians built a regular army, the Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA). A decree of 13 November 1918 called up men aged 18 to 35, and in early 1919 the army was organized into three corps of four brigades. Its weak points, Maciej Krotofil writes, were a shortage of officers, so that its commanders in chief came from Dnieper Ukraine, and the lack of an arms industry, so that ammunition ran short throughout the war. Yet until April 1919, he judges, it was an equal opponent for the Polish Army, a regular army and not the Ukrainian bands of Polish communiqués. Polish strength in Galicia, about 20,000 men in January 1919 by Andrzej Chojnowski's count, grew slowly but steadily, while the Ukrainians soon reached the limit of what they could mobilize.14
In mid-February 1919 the Ukrainians struck at the railway. Their Vovchukhy offensive, which began on 17 February by the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine's account (Dudko dates it from 16 to 23 February), cut the line between Przemyśl and Lwów and blockaded the city's garrison of about 15,000.15
The Entente's truce: the Barthélemy line
The Allied powers in Paris wanted the fighting stopped and the question left to them. A first inter-Allied mission under the French general Joseph Barthélemy (Berthélemy in many accounts) talked to both sides in January without result. A second, which included the British general Adrian Carton de Wiart and the American historian Robert Howard Lord, left Warsaw for Lwów on 17 February.16
Under its pressure a ceasefire took effect on 25 February. The general's demarcation line, Lyzen and his co-authors write, would have pushed the Ukrainians back behind the Bug and Stryi rivers and given Poland Lwów and the Drohobych and Borysław oil basin. The Ukrainians, who had Lwów blockaded and counted on a military victory, saw it as a one-sided order, and above all refused to give up the oil fields.17
The West Ukrainian government rejected the line; its army resumed the offensive on 1 March, and from 2 March the war was general again. Lyzen and his co-authors argue that the failure turned the Entente toward Poland and sped up the dispatch of Haller's army; back in Paris, Klimecki records, Barthélemy described the Ukrainian movement as a jacquerie out of control, unable to build a working state.18
In March the Poles regained the initiative. On 19 March their troops broke through near Horodok and reopened the railway to Przemyśl, and the first soldiers of a relief group under General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz entered Lwów the same day. Ukrainian guns kept shelling the city until the end of April.19
Paris tried once more. On 2 April the peace conference set up a commission under the South African general Louis Botha, whose line gave Lwów to Poland and the Drohobych and Borysław oil fields to the Ukrainians. The West Ukrainian side accepted it; the Polish side, which by then held the advantage at the front and wanted a decision on the battlefield, rejected it.20
Haller's army and the May 1919 offensive
The balance tipped with the arrival from France of General Józef Haller's army, the "Blue Army," trained and equipped by the French: six divisions and about 68,000 men by Chojnowski's count. The Allies had barred its use against the Ukrainians, a ban that Haller's IPN biographers call discrimination, but the Polish command, the historian Jacek Legieć writes, had no intention of respecting it.21
The offensive began on 14 May 1919 along the whole front, with about 50,000 Polish soldiers and Haller in overall command. Within two weeks the Poles had taken the Drohobych and Borysław oil basin and most of the province, and on 24 May Romanian troops, allied with Warsaw, entered Pokuttia, the south-eastern corner of Galicia.22
Then Piłsudski stopped. Fearing that Germany would reject the peace terms and attack, the Polish command began moving Haller's divisions west on 22 May, almost halving Polish strength in Galicia; Piłsudski, Legieć notes, presented this to the Entente as a concession. On 31 May General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz took over the front. The Galician Army, down to about 20,000 men, mostly through desertion, was left in a corner of south-eastern Galicia between the Zbruch, the Dniester and the Zolota Lypa.23
The Western Ukrainians were also running out of political room. Their union with Symon Petliura's Ukrainian People's Republic, proclaimed in Kyiv on 22 January 1919, stayed largely on paper: the ZUNR kept its own government and army, and, Krotofil and Klimecki agree, received little military help from Dnieper Ukraine.24
The Chortkiv offensive, June 1919
The Ukrainian answer came in June. On 7 June 1919 the Galician Army counterattacked near Chortkiv, retaking the town the next day; on 9 June Petrushevych, by then the republic's dictator, gave command to General Oleksandr Hrekov, who turned the local attack into an offensive along the whole front. Oleksandr Rublov of the Institute of History of Ukraine counts about 19,000 combat-ready men and 50 batteries at the start.25
In three weeks the Ukrainians drove the Poles back 120 kilometers by Rublov's count and 150 by Shankovsky's, and fought heavy battles at Ternopil on 14 June and Berezhany on 21 June.26
There the offensive died. The West Ukrainian leaders had just refused a ceasefire that envoys of Petliura's government signed with the Poles in Lwów on 16 June: for Petliura, Legieć explains, Kyiv came first, for the West Ukrainians Lwów, and their victories tempted them to trust in force. But the Galician Army could count only on itself, and it had too few rifles and too little ammunition to hold what it had won. On 28 June the Poles, with Piłsudski directing the offensive, broke through near Yanchyn; Rublov counts 38,600 Polish infantry against 24,000 Ukrainian.27
To the Zbruch: how the war ended
The Ukrainian army fell back into the corner between the Zbruch and the Dniester. On 16 and 17 July 1919 the Ukrainian Galician Army crossed the Zbruch into the lands of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and the West Ukrainian government moved to Kamianets-Podilskyi. Polish troops reached the river on 17 July.28
The army fought on beyond the river. Its corps helped take Kyiv at the end of August 1919, but typhus devastated it that autumn; in November it went over to Denikin's Whites, and in February 1920 to the Red Army. Krotofil judges that from the autumn of 1919 it had no fighting value left.29
Who won the Polish-Ukrainian War?
On the battlefield, Poland. Krotofil explains why: the Poles could draw on a larger country and on supplies from abroad, while the Western Ukrainians, loyal to the Habsburgs to the end of World War I, had no international recognition and only the resources of Eastern Galicia. The IPN credits the arrival of Haller's army. Lytvyn, writing for the Institute of History of Ukraine, stresses that the Galician Army, isolated and fighting on several fronts, still held out for nine months, which he calls a great moral and political feat.30
At the peace table the victory took years to confirm. On 25 June 1919 the Council of Four approved a note, drafted by the foreign ministers that day, authorizing Polish forces to pursue their operations as far as the Zbruch to protect the population from Bolshevik bands. The ministers' resolution let Poland use Haller's army and set up a civil government, subject to the province's autonomy and the eventual self-determination of its people, and the note stated that it did not decide Galicia's political future.31
In November 1919 the Allies went further. On 21 November the heads of delegations adopted a treaty for Eastern Galicia that gave Poland control for 25 years, after which the Council of the League of Nations would have full powers over the region's statute. Poland protested, and on 22 December the same council suspended the decision.32
The final word came from the Conference of Ambassadors. In a decision dated 15 March 1923 (Pisuliński dates its adoption to the day before), Britain, France, Italy and Japan fixed Poland's eastern frontier with Eastern Galicia inside it, recording Poland's acceptance that ethnographic conditions there required an autonomous regime; Pisuliński adds that the ambassadors declined to hear the Galician Ukrainians.33
Casualties and strength
No reliable total of the dead appears in the sources used here. The best documented losses are those of the November fighting in Lwów, where the IPN counts more than 400 Polish defenders killed, among them 120 school pupils and 76 university students (dzieje.pl gives 439), and those of the pogrom. The strength of both armies, as far as the sources allow, is set out in the table above.34
Epilogue: Piłsudski and Petliura, 1920
A year later the enemies of 1919 were allies. On 2 December 1919 Petliura's diplomatic mission under Andrii Livytsky gave up claims west of the Zbruch, and on 21 April 1920 the two states signed an alliance in Warsaw, with a military convention, that set their border on the river. On 7 May Polish troops, with two Ukrainian divisions at their side, entered Kyiv.35
For the Galician Ukrainians this was a betrayal. The Galician members of Livytsky's mission walked out of it, and on 20 December 1919 Petrushevych's government, now in Vienna, annulled the union with the Ukrainian People's Republic.36
Two memories of one war
Each nation remembers a different war. Polish memory centers on the defense of Lwów and the Lwów Eaglets, the young defenders held up as models between the wars; Ukrainian memory centers on 1 November 1918. Dudko notes that the Polish military cemetery in Lviv, wrecked in Soviet times, was restored only after long disputes and reopened on 24 June 2005 in the presence of the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, with a Ukrainian memorial beside it.37
The war's character is still argued over. Brożyniak stresses that it was no chivalrous war and that a Sejm commission investigated crimes by Ukrainian troops against prisoners and civilians; Krotofil, that the Poles fought a regular army; Lyzen and his co-authors, that Entente diplomacy worked against the Ukrainians; and Holyk sees a clash of national myths in which each side took the other for invaders on land that was not theirs.38
