The last Polish attempts to play the UNR card

After the conclusion of the Riga peace treaty Poland still had one fairly important asset, in fact the only one it had left of any commensurate value, allowing it to consider an active part in the political tussle in Ukraine. That asset was the Ukrainian emigre community (both the politicians and military men) who in the autumn of 1920 found a sanctuary on the territory of the Polish Republic. An exact determination of the number of exiles from Dnieper Ukraine who arrived in Poland does not seem feasible, but estimates which take into account a series of conflicting documentary data give figures ranging from 35 to 45 thousand. We know for certain that at the beginning of 1921 there were around 15–16 thousand ex-officers and men of the UNR Army in Poland. They were quartered in six internment camps which the Polish military authorities had arranged for them in Kalisz, Aleksandrow Kujawski, Łańcut, Piotrkow, Pikulice, and Wadowice. In compliance with the agreement that had been made earlier, the Ukrainian units in the camps were organised in their own way and under their own commanders. The Ukrainian Military Liquidation Committee based in Warsaw presided over by General Viktor Zelins'kyi liaised between the interned army and the Polish authorities. Ukrainian civilian authorities under the leadership of Symon Petliura, Head of the Directory, along with the UNR government and its administrative staff numbering nearly 2 thousand, were on Polish territory as well. In February 1921 the Council of the Republic (Rada Respubliky; the Ukrainian proto-parliament) initiated its operations in exile. The supreme authorities of the UNR and its main administrative bodies were put up in Tarnow, which had hosted Ukrainians already in the summer of 1920.

So the emigres were a significant advantage held by the Poles, but the question was how to play their trump card, or whether to play it at all. At the beginning of 1921 Piłsudski was still demonstrating his interest in the Ukrainian question and his sympathetic attitude to his erstwhile allies, and expressed it in two personal meetings with Petliura for confidential discussions on political and military issues.