Misconceived realpolitik in a failing state: the political and economical fiasco of the Central Powers in the Ukraine, 1918

Abstract

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Agreement was supposed to be a grand solution. Germany and Austria-Hungary, under increasing domestic pressure, wanted to create facts on at least one front and demonstrate to the world at large their willingness to accept peace. In reality, the German Supreme Army Command's main goal was to bring large parts of Eastern Europe under German control and permanently weaken revolution-torn Russia. Since late 1917, Ukraine appeared to be the key to controlling the entire region: it was considered the ‘breadbasket’ of the former Russian Empire, it possessed heavy industry in the East and it offered access to the Black Sea. But the Brest Treaty proved to be brittle and the contracting states showed themselves to be either politically unstable (Ukraine) or unreliable (Bolshevik Russia). Additionally, Ukraine was not even remotely capable of fulfilling its economic pledges. Furthermore, the ‘dictated peace’ proved to the entente that there could be no negotiated peace with Germany and that fighting would have to continue until the capitulation of the Central Powers. This article will analyse, first, the position of Ukraine within the Central Powers' foreign-policy and military-strategic conception until the invasion in early 1918; second, the occupation policies of 1918; and, third, the Ukrainians' own perception of the Central Powers. The Ukrainian ‘failing state’ exemplifies, with particular clarity, the Central Powers' strategic overstretch and their ill-considered policy in Eastern Europe at the end of the First World War. Finally, this essay will place the wartime conduct of the Central Powers in Ukraine into the larger scholarly discussion of the ‘German Way of War’.