Western Province of the Ukrainian National Republic

Western Province of the Ukrainian National Republic (Zakhidnia oblast Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky, or ZOUNR). The name assumed by the Western Ukrainian National Republic after the proclamation of union with the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). According to the resolution of the Ukrainian National Rada, passed in Stanyslaviv on 3 January 1919, and the proclamation of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic, issued on 22 January 1919, the two states merged into one, with ZOUNR preserving its territorial autonomy. The final union of the two states was to be settled by the Constituent Assembly of Ukraine. Until then the Ukrainian National Rada and the State Secretariat of the Western Ukrainian National Republic were invested with civil and military power on the territory of the ZOUNR. Only the commands of the armed forces at the front were merged, a joint delegation was sent to the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), and a common currency was introduced. For a brief while Yevhen Petrushevych, the president of the Ukrainian National Rada, was a member of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic. The Directory set up a special ministry for the ZOUNR, which was later abolished. When the UNR mission to Warsaw declared on 2 December 1919 that the government of the UNR had no interest in the territory of Western Ukraine, the government of the ZOUNR (see Dictatorship of the Western Province of the Ukrainian National Republic), including its delegation in Paris, rejected the joint institutions with the Directory and began to conduct its own, independent policy. At the beginning of 1920 the ZOUNR government-in-exile and its delegation in Paris returned to the former name of the state, the Western Ukrainian National Republic, and began to call its territory eastern Galicia, because that name had been used in mid-1919 in the documents of the Paris Peace Conference.

Matvii Stakhiv

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]




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