A Battle in Ukraine Echoes Through the Decades - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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While often killing only their own brethren on the battlefields of World War I, Mr. Pavlyshyn said, Ukrainians who served on opposite sides discovered for the first time “that they were the same people and started to think like Ukrainians.” A nationalist cause that had been mostly limited to intellectuals and politicians expanded to “create a real national consciousness.”
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When the war erupted nearly a century ago, Russian forces mobilized and swiftly captured the western city of Lviv and the surrounding region of eastern Galicia. Aleksei Brusilov, a Russian commanding officer, proclaimed the territory — under Hapsburg control for more than two centuries and ruled before that by Poland — as “Russian land from time immemorial, populated after all by Russian people.”
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Instead of rallying behind Russia and its ruler, Czar Nicholas II, however, many Ukrainians in the west sided with the Hapsburg dynasty, which had granted them a political voice and freedoms unimaginable to Ukrainian speakers living under the Russian Empire to the east.
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