Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Who lost the Polish–Ukrainian War?
Although the 70 to 75 thousand men who fought in the Ukrainian Galician Army lost their war, and the Polish territory was brought back to Poland, the experience of proclaiming a Ukrainian state and fighting for it significantly intensified and deepened the nationalistic Ukrainian orientation within Galicia. Since the interwar era, Galicia has been the center of Ukrainian nationalism.[96]
Among these were many young volunteers (such as Antoni Petrykiewicz), who became known as the "Lwów Eaglets". Initially this term was confined to those who had participated in the fights within the city between November 1 and November 22, 1918, and the following siege by the Ukrainian army between November 23, 1918 and May 22, 1919. With time, however, the term's application was broadened, and it is now used for all the young soldiers who fought in the area of Eastern Galicia for the Polish cause in the Polish-Ukrainian War and the Polish-Bolshevik War. In addition to the young Polish nationals of Lviv, those fighting in the Polish-Ukrainian battle for Przemyśl are also frequently referred to as "Przemyskie Orlęta" ('"Przemyśl Eaglets").
In the 1930s the Polish government attempted to assimilate western Ukrainian nobles into Polish culture. At that time, Polish researchers claimed that the Ukrainian nobles were descended from poor Polish nobles who became assimilated into Ukrainian culture by adopting the Ukrainian language and Orthodox religion of the peasants among whom they lived. They noted that the period of Polish rule involved the settlement of newly acquired Ukrainian territories by Poles, and that the Ukrainian nobility's speech frequently used Polish words and expressions. The Polish historians also pointed out that in the early 19th century western Ukrainian nobles tended to ally themselves with Polish rather than East Slavic or Ukrainian causes politically. This was seen as a vestige of their originally Polish roots. 
Later Kiev became a war zone in the lasting and bloody struggle between Ukrainian, Polish and Russian Bolshevik governments in the time of Russian Revolution, Ukrainian-Soviet War, Polish-Ukrainian War and Polish-Soviet War.
Towards the end of World War I, Galicia became a battleground of the Polish-Ukrainian War which erupted in November 1918. During the conflict, 1,200 Jews joined the Ukrainian Galician Army and formed an all-Jewish Ukrainian battalion called "Zhydivs’kyy Kurin" (UHA). In exchange, they were allotted 10% of the seats in the parliament of the West Ukrainian People's Republic which emerged in the same month and was disbanded nine months later. The West Ukrainian government respected Jewish neutrality during the Polish-Ukrainian conflict by an order of Yevhen Petrushevych forbidding to mobilize Jews against their will, or to otherwise force them to contribute to the Ukrainian military effort. Both Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian Jewish armed units suffered significant losses as they retreated from Galicia before the army of General Edward Rydz-Śmigły. Although the Polish losses were estimated at more than 10,000 dead and wounded; the Western Ukrainian army lost in excess of 15,000 men. "Despite the official neutrality, some Jewish men had been noticed aiding the combat Ukrainian units, and this fact alone caused a great enthusiasm in the Ukrainian press." Reportedly, the Council of Ministers of the West Ukrainian People's Republic provided assistance to Jewish victims of the Polish pogrom in Lviv, wrote Alexander Prusin. Nevertheless, as noted by Robert Blobaum from West Virginia University, many more pogroms and assaults against Galician Jews were perpetrated by the Ukrainian side in rural areas and other towns. Between 22 and 26 March 1919, during massacres in Zhytomyr (Jitomir), 500–700 Jews lost their lives at the hands of the armed men from the Ukrainian republican army led by Simon Petliura. The chief organizer of the pogrom became minister of war soon thereafter. Simultaneous Ukrainian pogroms took place in Berdichev, Uma, and Cherniakhov among other places.
On April 26, in his "Call to the People of Ukraine", Piłsudski assured that "the Polish army would only stay as long as necessary until a legal Ukrainian government took control over its own territory". Despite this, many Ukrainians were just as anti-Polish as anti-Bolshevik, and resented the Polish advance, which many viewed as just a new variety of occupation considering previous defeat in the Polish-Ukrainian War. Thus, Ukrainians also actively fought the Polish invasion in Ukrainian formations of the Red Army. Some scholars stress the effects of Soviet propaganda in encouraging negative Ukrainian sentiment towards the Polish operation and Polish-Ukrainian history in general.
Wiktor Poliszczuk (10 October 1925 in Dubno near Rivne – 17 November 2008 in Toronto) was a Polish-Ukrainian-Canadian (a Canadian citizen of Polish-Ukrainian descent) politologist specialising in the history of political thought, who wrote about the Polish-Ukrainian relations during World War II and issues relating to the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism in the 20th century resulting in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Poliszczuk's work has been criticized by several Polish, Canadian, American, and Ukrainian historians, but also acknowledged for his Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation effort.
In the immediate post-World War I period, Skalat was seized by local Ukrainian activists, who declared that the town was part of West Ukrainian People's Republic. Polish - Ukrainian tension escalated, and climaxed in the Polish–Ukrainian War. On April 23, 1919, Ukrainian activists murdered a popular Roman Catholic parish priest from Skalat, Rev. Walerian Raba, and on July 16, 1919, the town was captured by the Polish Army.
In 2002 Grzegorz Motyka, finding all the previous concepts regarding the anti-Polish actions of the UPA inadequate, suggested viewing the Ukrainian-Polish relations from the point of view of the question of Ukrainian insurrection during the war. Encouraged by the mass desertion of the Ukrainian police, Dmytro Kliachkivsky (Klym Savur) initiated a wave of UPA attacks against the Polish civilian population. Kliachkivsky gave the liquidation order on July 11. By Autumn 1944 most of the anti-Polish actions stopped and terror was used only against those who co-operated with the NKVD, and the Ukrainians leaders had understood that it was time to unite with the Poles against the USSR. Polish actions against the Ukrainian civilian population were restricted and punitive in their nature according to Motyka. They were done by the Polish auxiliary police, the self-defense leagues, the AK, and by Red partisan units formed from ethnic Poles. In his latest studies, Motyka attempts to synthesize the main concepts of both current directions in Polish historiography, analyzing and understanding the problem of anti-Polish terror in Volyn, the reasons and the results, in order to induce the Ukrainians to officially condemn the activities of the OUN and UPA.
According to Polish historians, during the course of the war, Ukrainian forces conducted massacres against the Polish population in Sokoloniki where 500 buildings were burned down and circa 50 Poles killed[87]In Zamarstynow. a Ukrainian commander accused the Polish population of supporting the Polish side and allowed for brutal house searchers by his troops in which civilians were beaten, robbed, murdered and raped. Ukrainian forces also murdered prisoners of war during these events. A day later, Polish troops executed a group of Ukrainian prisoners in retaliation.[88][89].
In 1772 the city fell to Austrians and in 1791 it lost its status. During the second half of the 19th century a railroad line linking Stryi with Stanislaviv was led through the city. By the end of the 19th century big fires destroyed the town completely. The first decade of the new century was dedicated to the revival of the town. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, reborn Polish and Ukrainian states struggled for control over Dolyna in a fratricidal war won by Poles (see Polish-Ukrainian War). In the Second Polish Republic, the town, with population of almost 10 000, belonged to the Stanisławów Voivodeship and was the capital of the Dolina County. Neighboring villages were inhabited by German settlers, who came there in the times of Joseph II.
The Polish–Ukrainian War of November 1918 and 1919 was a conflict between the Second Polish Republic and Ukrainian forces (both the West Ukrainian People's Republic and Ukrainian People's Republic). The conflict had its roots in ethnic, cultural and political differences between the Polish and Ukrainian populations living in the region. The war started in Eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and spilled over into Chełm Land and Volhynia (Wołyń) regions formerly belonging to the Russian Empire, which were both claimed by the Ukrainian State (a client state of the German Empire) and the Ukrainian People's Republic.
Józef Piłsudski, an important interwar Polish politician, significantly responsible for Poland's regained independence in the aftermath of World War I, planner of the 1919 Polish coup d'état attempt in Lithuania and orchestrator of the Żeligowski's Mutiny that brought the disputed Vilnius Region into Poland, often drew attention to his Lithuanian ancestry, and briefly pursued the re-creation of the old Commonwealth. In light of the other great plan for post-World War I order, the Bolshevik intention to spread the communist revolution through the Red Army, his goal of re-constituting the Commonwealth "could only be achieved by war." Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and troubles. With the collapse of Russian and German occupying authorities, virtually all of the newly independent neighbours began fighting over borders: Romania fought with Hungary over Transylvania, Yugoslavia with Italy over Rijeka, Poland with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn Silesia, with Germany over Poznań, with Ukraine over Eastern Galicia, with Lithuania over Vilnius Region. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians fought against each other and against the Russians, who were just as divided. Spreading Communist influences resulted in Communist revolutions in Munich, Berlin, Budapest and Prešov, and finally, in the Polish-Soviet War. Speaking of that period, Winston Churchill commented: "The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies began." Eventually, the bad blood created but those conflicts, and the staunch opposition by (primarily) Polish and Lithuanian nationalists towards the federation idea, and finally the Peace of Riga, in which Poland abandoned the Belarusian and Ukrainian independence cause, would doom the idea of the Międzymorze federation. The failure to create a strong counterbalance to Germany and Soviet Union, such as Międzymorze, which Piłsudski saw as a counterweight to Russian and German imperialism, according to some historians, doomed those countries to of World War II. In another contradiction of that times, as some Poles and Ukrainians, pursuing the Polish-Ukrainian alliance even after Riga worked together to liberate Soviet Ukraine and restore Ukrainian independence, and some Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants hoped for a new Polish-Soviet war that would bring them freedom, ethnic cleansing of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists within Poland contributed to Pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia (1930).
In attempt to end the war, in January 1919 an Allied commission led by a French general was sent to negotiate a peace treaty between the two sides, prompting a ceasefire. In February it recommended that the West Ukrainian People's Republic surrender a third of its territory, including the city of Lviv and the Drohobych oil fields. The Ukrainians refused, the truce did not correspond to ethnology of the country or the military situation and broke diplomatic ties with Poland.[55][63] In mid-March 1919, the French marshal Ferdinand Foch, who wanted to use Poland as an operational base for an offensive against the Red Army, brought the issue of Polish–Ukrainian war before the Supreme Council and appealed for large-scale Polish-Romanian military operation which would be conducted with Allied support, as well as sending Haller's divisions to Poland immediately to relieve Lviv from Ukrainian siege.[59]
Bloody ethnic conflict exploded during World War II in areas of today's western Ukraine, inhabited at that time by Ukrainians and a Polish minority (and until recently by Jews, most of whom had been killed by the Nazis before 1943). The Ukrainians, who blamed the Poles for preventing the emergence of their national state and for Poland's nationality policies (such as military colonization in Kresy), undertook during the interwar years a campaign of terror led by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Under Piłsudski and his successors the Polish state authorities responded with harsh pacification measures. The events that unfolded in the 1940s were a legacy of this bitterness and also a result of other factors, such as the activities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Ukrainians, generally assigned by the Nazis the same inferior status as Poles, in many practical respects received a more favorable treatment. However, the Germans thwarted the Ukrainian attempts to establish a Ukrainian state, imprisoned Ukrainian leaders, and split the occupied lands that Ukrainians considered theirs into two administrative units. Following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, the Ukrainian nationalists feared a repeat of the post-World War I scenario: a power vacuum left by the exhausted great powers and a Polish armed takeover of western Ukraine. Aiming for a country without any Poles or Polish interests left, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) undertook to create an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian society by physically eliminating the Poles. The German occupiers, whose long-standing policy was to aggravate further the Polish-Ukrainian enmity, for the most part did not intervene in the resulting campaigns of ethnic cleansing.
In 1919 with the end of the Polish–Ukrainian War, which resulted in the takeover of western Ukraine by the Second Polish Republic, many former leaders of the Ukrainian republic were exiled. As Polish persecution of Ukrainians during the interwar period increased, many Ukrainians (particularly the youth, many of whom felt they had no future) lost faith in traditional legal approaches, in their elders, and in the western democracies who were seen as turning their backs on Ukraine. This period of disillusionment coincided with the increase in support for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). By the beginning of the Second World War, the OUN was estimated to have 20,000 active members and many times that number in sympathizers. The song was written in 1929 during the midst of these political events and adopted by the organization's leadership 3 years later.
Initially the Soviet occupation gained support among some members of the linguistic minorities who had chafed under the nationalist policies of the Second Polish Republic. Much of the Ukrainian population initially welcomed the unification with the Soviet Ukraine because twenty years earlier their attempt at self-determination failed during both the Polish–Ukrainian War and the Ukrainian–Soviet War.[97]
By the times of Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) much of Poland's previous territory, which were historically mixed Ruthenian and Polish, had Ukrainian and Belorussian majorities. Following the post-World War I rebirth of the Polish statehood, these lands again became disputed but the Poles were more successful than the nascent West Ukrainian People's Republic in the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918. Approximately one third of the new state's population was non-Catholic, including a large number of Russian Jews who immigrated to Poland following a wave of Ukrainian pogroms which continued until 1921. The Jews were entitled by a peace treaty in Riga to choose the country they preferred and several hundred thousand joined the already large Jewish minority of the Polish Second Republic.
Relations with the much larger Ukrainian minority, who formed 15% or so of the national population and were in the majority in several eastern provinces, were even more strained. The Ukrainians were poor peasants who resented their Polish landlords and the government's policy of polonizing them. The schools after 1924 were bilingual (students had to learn Polish), and government offices were not allowed to use Ukrainian. Some Ukrainians tried sabotage, and the government cracked down with mass arrests; it tolerated Polish arson of Ukrainian community centers. Orthodox churches were closed, especially in Volhynia province. Some men went underground and tried to assassinate Ukrainians who collaborated with the government, as well as top Polish officials. A compromise was reached in 1935 that somewhat quieted the situation, but the Polish Army saw a war with the USSR looming and refused to support the policy.
After Operation Barbarossa, the German military and Orpo aided by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police battalions, began mass deportations of Polish inhabitants of Zamojszczyzna south of Chełm in preparation for the "Generalplan Ost" resettlement ordered by "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler. Some Polish villages were simply razed and their inhabitants massacred. During "Heim ins Reich Ukraineraktion" , pro-Nazi Ukrainians and German-Ukrainian "Volksdeutsche" were being resettled there along with ethnic Germans from the east. They were given new latifundia built by Jewish prisoners of the Lublin Reservation who were sent to nearby Sobibór extermination camp afterwards. The Polish underground retaliated by launching the Zamość uprising, considered to be among the largest actions of the Polish resistance during World War II. Some Ukrainian sources refer to this operation as a massacre of Ukrainian villagers near Chelm and in the Podlasie area, and attribute thousands of those killed to the Polish underground. Such claims are rejected by the Institute of National Remembrance, and debunked by Ukrainian authors of the "Historical Dictionary of Ukraine" who point out that recent studies confirm a much lower figure. According to Jewish sources, the Jewish partisans themselves used to execute Ukrainian villagers "who had gone to the woods to round up the Jews who had escaped" from the ghettos. The killings in villages near the Parczew forest were motivated by revenge for the "anti-Jewish activities" of the Ukrainian peasants.
For Poles living in Eastern Galicia, the victory of the Polish forces over the Ukrainian Galician Army and the prospect of the region once again becoming part of the newly reconstructed Polish Republic, after 123 years of foreign domination caused a great wave of excitement. In the years following the war, battles such as the Defense of Lwów were remembered as outstanding examples of Polish heroism and resilience. Young defenders of the Łyczakowski Cemetery, who lost their lives defending the city, such as Jerzy Bitschan became household names in Poland during the interwar period.[99][100][101]
The main Polish success was concluding signing a military alliance with the Ukrainian People's Republic of Symon Petliura. Ukrainians, who have faced a series of defeats on hands of both Poles and Soviets, decided that the only way to preserve some form of independence was to ally themselves with one faction and majority of Ukrainian leaders chose Poland as the less imperialistic of their enemies. Petliura had, after his government's defeat by the Bolsheviks, found asylum in Poland and now headed a new Ukrainian Army. The Polish–Ukrainian War ended around July 1919 and from September both Polish and Ukrainians fought together against the Soviets.
Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some citizens of the Second Polish Republic who were not ethnically Polish. Some members of the Ukrainian population welcomed the unification with the Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainians had failed to achieve independence in 1919 when their attempt at self-determination was crushed during the Polish–Soviet and Polish-Ukrainian Wars. Also, there were groups of pre-war Polish citizens including Jews and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists, who saw the Soviet NKVD presence as an opportunity to start political and social agitation. Many of them committed treason against the Polish state by assisting in round ups and executions of Polish officials. Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all peoples equally.
Creation of the Legion, as this was original name of the organization, is attributed to Major Aleksandra Zagórska, who was the commander of female couriers during the Polish–Ukrainian War. During the fighting, Zagórska lost her teenage son, 14-year-old Jerzy Bitschan, who was killed by Ukrainian shells on the Lychakiv Cemetery, and about whom several songs were later written. Altogether, 66 Polish women died fighting in Lviv in late 1918.
Almost immediately after the defeat of Germany, Lenin's government annulled their Brest-Litovsk Treaty – which Leon Trotsky described as "no war no peace" – and invaded Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe that were formed under German protection. Simultaneously, the collapse of the Central Powers affected the former Austrian province of Galicia, which was populated by Ukrainians and Poles. The Ukrainians proclaimed a Western Ukrainian People's Republic (WUNR) in Eastern Galicia, which wished to unite with the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR); while the Poles of Eastern Galicia – who were mainly concentrated in Lwów () – gave their allegiance to the newly formed Second Polish Republic. Both sides became increasingly hostile with each other. On January 22, 1919, the Western Ukrainian People's Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic signed an Act of Union in Kiev. By October 1919, the Ukrainian Galician Army of the WUNR was defeated by Polish forces in the Polish–Ukrainian War and Eastern Galicia was annexed to Poland; the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 granted Eastern Galicia to Poland for 25 years.