The Conference of Ambassadors of the League of Nations, deciding unresolved claims from the Polish Ukrainian War, 1918-1919, awarded Eastern Glacia to Poland including Lviv, Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivsk) and Tarnopol (Ternopil). Ukraine had, by that time, functionally ceased to exist. Following World War Two, the Soviet Union would redraw the border to give them to Ukraine and move the Poles west, and likewise move Germans west as well, redrawing the German frontier as well.
Millions of people found themselves moving, or if they'd already been refugees, unable to return home.
To a large extent, this reflected both the mixed national boundaries of empire and the sharpening of nationalism following World War One. The Poles and the Ukrainians blended into each other on the western fringes of the Russian Empire, and some Polish populations remain in Ukraine today. Lviv, for its part, had a significant Jewish population before the Second World War resulted in their extermination. The Poles, as a people, extended much further East before the Soviet Union forcibly redrew its border after World War Two. Russia also redrew Ukraine's border after 1919 to Russia's favor.
Of note today, Ukraine once extended further north, and further east. Russia effectively sits today on land that it started occupying in the 1920s that had been Ukrainian. Today, however, it should not be presumed that Russian territory originally claimed by Ukraine retains a Ukrainian population.
Also of note, Ukraine today sits pretty much within a smaller version of its original claimed modern borders. A large section of Poland ended up within it following World War Two, but about 60% of that had been claimed by Ukraine right after World War One, reflecting in part the mixed Polish Ukrainian population in that region at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment