WESTERN UKRAINIAN CHALLENGES TO THE VERSAILLES-WASHINGTON SYSTEM OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (1918–1923)

Abstract

The principle of self-determination of peoples proclaimed by world leaders did not become the basis for post-war national and state demarcation, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, where a number of national states were restored after the collapse of the great monarchies of 1917–1918. Thus, in 1918–1923, the Ukrainian ethnic territory, primarily that of the united Ukrainian People’s Republic, was redistributed by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bolshevik Russia, which had signed the Brest Peace with defeated Germany and was in international isolation until the Riga Agreement. Western leaders did not believe in the state power of the disunited politicians of the UPR and ZUNR, nor in the monarchist plans of the Hetmanate, which was manoeuvring between German and White Guard postwar strategies. The Entente countries assigned the role of a sanitary frontier against the possible expansion of Bolshevik Russia (later the USSR) to the revived Poland in 1918, with which France signed a political treaty and a military convention in 1921. The Paris and subsequent peace conferences considered the postwar fate of Ukraine, as a rule, in the context of solving the Polish or Russian problem. For some time, the ZUNR government was supported by the UK and Czechoslovakia, but given the weakness and short-lived nature of the governments of the Dnipro and Galicia, they preferred the Polish solution to the Eastern Galician problem. The US government, taking into account the historical heritage of the Russian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, underestimated the need to revive an independent Ukraine and create a new balance of power in Eastern Europe.