The Peace Treaty of Riga which was signed in March 1921 opened up a new stage in Polish-Russian, but also in Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Belarusian relations. During the negotiations which went on for several months a foundation was laid for a compromise status quo. The adoption of the compromise established a fixed eastern border and international position for Poland, while at the same time putting paid to Jozef Piłsudski's far-reaching geopolitical project, which envisaged the breaking down of the Russian empire into a series of independent national territories. The treaty was an especially painful blow to the aspirations of the Ukrainians and Belarusians, whose native lands were dissected by the Riga border. For Ukrainian patriots the Polish-Soviet peace treaty was the symbol of a new Andrusovo: like that truce agreement entered on by Poland-Lithuania and Russia in the 17th century, it wrecked their hopes for the establishment of a state of their own.

We should add that the treaty negotiated at Riga did not signify real peace. It was soon followed by the outbreak of a Polish-Soviet cold war, which many a time in the early 1920s threatened to heat up to boiling point. One of the salient fronts on which it was fought was Ukraine and the Ukrainian question. The means by which it was waged – first by Poland, and subsequently, more successfully, by the Soviets – was by trying to stir up centrifugal tendencies on enemy territory, leading eventually to the splitting up of the neighbouring state along its national seams. Polish-Soviet rivalry over Ukraine had flared up still at the Riga peace conference. In the following years both antagonists struggled to win over the sympathies of Ukrainians living on either side of the frontier River Zbrucz (Zbruch) and dispersed in various emigre centres, and the weapons employed were propaganda, diplomacy, policy on nationalities, economic projects, political subterfuge, and armed irredentism. The Poles, initially very active and holding numerous advantages, soon started to lose ground to their adversary. By 1926 they were on the retreat on all the secret war battlefields.