Polish-Soviet War: The Polish army under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły celebrates its capture of Kiev with a victory parade on Khreshchatyk.
The 1920 Kiev Offensive (or Kiev Expedition, wyprawa kijowska in Polish) was a major part of the PolishSoviet War. It was an attempt by the armed forces of the recently established Second Polish Republic led by Jzef Pisudski, in alliance with Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura of the Ukrainian People's Republic, to seize the territories of modern-day Ukraine which mostly fell under Soviet control after the October Revolution as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.Polish and Soviet forces fought in 1919 and the Poles advanced in the disputed borderlands. In early 1920, Pisudski concentrated on preparations for a military invasion of central Ukraine. It would result, he anticipated, in destruction of the Soviet armies and force Soviet acceptance of unilateral Polish conditions. The Poles signed an alliance, known as the Treaty of Warsaw, with the forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic led by Petliura. The Kiev Offensive was the central component of Pisudski's plan for a new order in Eastern Europe centered around a Polish-led Intermarium federation. The stated goal of the operation was to create a formally independent Ukraine, although its dependence on Poland was inherent to Pisudski's plans. Ukrainians ended up fighting on both sides of the conflict.The campaign was conducted from April to July 1920. The Polish Army faced the forces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. At first the war was successful for the allied Polish and Ukrainian armies which captured Kiev (Kyiv) on 7 May 1920, but soon the campaign's progress was dramatically reversed, due to a Red Army counter-offensive in which the 1st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny played a prominent part. In the wake of the Soviet advance, the short-lived Galician Soviet Socialist Republic was created. The Polish-Soviet War ended with the Peace of Riga of 1921, which settled the border between Poland and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
The Polish–Soviet War (late autumn 1918/14 February 1919 – 18 March 1921) was fought primarily between the Second Polish Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in the aftermath of World War I, on territories formerly held by the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
On 13 November 1918, after the collapse of the Central Powers and the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Vladimir Lenin's Russia annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which it had signed with the Central Powers in March 1918) and soon started slowly moving forces in the western direction to recover and secure the lands vacated by the German forces that the Russian state had lost under the treaty. Lenin saw the newly independent Poland (formed in October–November 1918) as the bridge which his Red Army would have to cross to assist other communist movements and to bring about more European revolutions. At the same time, leading Polish politicians of different orientations pursued the general expectation of restoring the country's pre-1772 borders. Motivated by that idea, Polish Chief of State Józef Piłsudski (in office from 14 November 1918) began moving troops east.
In 1919, while the Soviet Red Army was still preoccupied with the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, the Polish Army took most of Lithuania and Belarus. By July 1919, Polish forces had taken control of much of Western Ukraine and had emerged victorious from the Polish–Ukrainian War of November 1918 to July 1919. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of Ukraine bordering on Russia, Symon Petliura tried to defend the Ukrainian People's Republic, but as the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand in the Russian Civil War, they advanced westward towards the disputed Ukrainian lands and made Petliura's forces retreat. Reduced to a small amount of territory in the west, Petliura was compelled to seek an alliance with Piłsudski, officially concluded in April 1920.
Piłsudski believed that the best way for Poland to secure favorable borders was by military action and that he could easily defeat the Red Army forces. His Kiev Offensive, considered to have begun the Polish–Soviet War sensu stricto, commenced in late April 1920 and resulted in the takeover of Kiev by the Polish and allied Ukrainian forces on 7 May. The Soviet armies in the area, which were weaker, had not been defeated, as they avoided major confrontations and withdrew.
The Red Army responded to the Polish offensive with successful counterattacks: from 5 June on the southern Ukrainian front and from 4 July on the northern front. The Soviet operation pushed the Polish forces back westward all the way to Warsaw, the Polish capital, while the Directorate of Ukraine fled to Western Europe. Fears of Soviet troops arriving at the German borders increased the interest and involvement of the Western powers in the war. In mid-summer the fall of Warsaw seemed certain, but in mid-August the tide had turned again after the Polish forces achieved an unexpected and decisive victory at the Battle of Warsaw (12 to 25 August 1920). In the wake of the eastward Polish advance that followed, the Soviets sued for peace, and the war ended with a ceasefire on 18 October 1920.
The Peace of Riga, signed on 18 March 1921, divided the disputed territories between Poland and Soviet Russia. The war and the treaty negotiations determined the Soviet–Polish border for the rest of the interwar period. Poland's eastern border was established at about 200 km east of the Curzon Line (a 1920 British proposal for Poland's border, based on the version approved in 1919 by the Entente leaders as the limit of Poland's expansion in the eastern direction). Ukraine and Belarus became divided between Poland and Soviet Russia, which established the respective Soviet republics in its areas of the territory.
The peace negotiations – on the Polish side conducted chiefly by Piłsudski's opponents and against his will – ended with the official recognition of the two Soviet republics, which became parties to the treaty. This outcome and the new border agreed on precluded any possibility of the formation of the Intermarium Polish-led federation of states that Piłsudski had envisaged or of meeting his other eastern-policy goals. The Soviet Union, established in December 1922, later used the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Republic to claim their unification with parts of the Kresy territories where East Slavic people outnumbered ethnic Poles and had remained, after the Peace of Riga, on the Polish side of the border, lacking any form of autonomy.