UKRAINE AS AN OBJECT OF GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND LESSONS OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE CONFERENCE OF AMBASSADORS IN MARCH 14, 1923

Abstract

The report reconstructs how one hundred years ago the world's largest powers, primarily France, Great Britain, Japan, the Kingdom of Italy, and the United States, began to build a new Versailles-Washington system of international relations, which consolidated territorial changes as a result of the First World War and the collapse of the German, Ottoman, and Austrian-Hungarian and Russian empires. The geopolitical prerequisites and consequences of the Resolution of the Council of Ambassadors of March 14, 1923 regarding Eastern Galicia are analyzed. It has been proven that the principle of self-determination of peoples, proclaimed by world leaders, did not become the basis of post-war national-state demarcation, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, with the support of the Entente, the Ukrainian ethnic territory (conciliar Ukrainian People's Republic) was redistributed by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Bolshevik Russia, which concluded the Peace of Brest with defeated Germany and was in international isolation for some time. The countries of the West did not believe in the state efforts of the disunited political elite of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Ukraine and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, as well as in the monarchical plans of the Hetmanate, which manoeuvre between German and White Guard post-war strategies. The Entente countries assigned the role of a sanitary border against the possible expansion of Bolshevik Russia (later the USSR) to the revived Poland in 1918, with which France concluded a political agreement and a military convention in 1921. The postwar Eastern European borders, in particular between Poland and the USSR along the Zbruch River, were «legitimized» by the Peace of Riga in 1921, as well as by the resolution of the Entente Council of Ambassadors in 1923, which marked the foreign policy defeat of both the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, as well as the end of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1914–1923 It was established that Warsaw ignored the international demand to grant national-territorial autonomy to Ukrainians, instead dividing the region into three voivodships even before the specified resolution. Keywords: Ukraine, East Galicia, Poland, countries of the Entente, geopolitics, military occupation, political parties.