Escaped the "triangle of death" but fell victim to politics: the fate of UNR army commander General Omelianovych-Pavlenko.

An outstanding Ukrainian military figure, General-Horunzhy of the Army of the Ukrainian Republic (UНР), and its commander-in-chief during the heroic First Winter Campaign, the commander of the Ukrainian Galician Army, is largely unknown to the broader masses of our compatriots. His arduous journey deserves recognition. The names of Ukrainian politicians such as Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Symon Petliura are well-known, while military leaders remain in the shadows.

"Woe to the vanquished!" — history is written by the victors, who, after the defeat of the National Revolution of 1917—1921 in Ukraine, were primarily the Soviet and Polish occupiers. There was no place for Ukraine on the map of Europe, as the main victors of World War I – France and Great Britain – refused to recognize the legitimacy of two independent Ukrainian states. Despite the Act of Unification of 1919, the UНР and ZUNR never became a unified entity and often fought off enemies alone or found themselves with completely different forces as foes and allies. By the beginning of 1921, our ethnic land, from the San to the Don, was already torn apart and divided among Soviet Russia (Great Ukraine), the Second Polish Republic (Volhynia and Eastern Galicia), the Kingdom of Romania (Northern Bukovina), and democratic Czechoslovakia (Subcarpathian Rus – Transcarpathia).

Mykhailo Volodymyrovych was born on December 8(20), 1878 in Tiflis to a noble family. His father was a general in the artillery, coming from an ancient Ukrainian Cossack family; a son of a Cossack officer of the Danube Cossacks who returned to Russia from the Ottoman Empire in 1829. His mother hailed from the Georgian princely family of Rusievi-Kurtsibashvili. Mykhailo's younger brother, Ivan, was also an active participant in the national liberation struggle in Ukraine; he served as General-Horunzhy of the Army of the UНР.

The brothers joined the service in the Imperial Russian Army at the beginning of the 20th century. Mykhailo participated in the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904—1905 for the Romanov regime. He fought in Manchuria near Sandepu and Mukden, sustaining a concussion; he returned to his post in Warsaw with the Volhynian Life Guards Regiment.

During World War I, he served as the commander of a company and later a battalion of this regiment. After suffering a severe shoulder wound in a battle against the Kaiser’s troops in November 1914 in Poland, he was awarded the Order of Saint George 4th class. Mykhailo Pavlenko spent almost a year recovering from his injury (his arm later functioned poorly) and the effects of a bout of typhus. Almost simultaneously, the brothers were promoted to colonels. From November 1916, Mykhailo became the head of the II Odessa Infantry School for Non-Commissioned Officers.

At the outset of the February Revolution, Colonel Mykhailo Pavlenko, who had grown up and served outside of Ukraine and did not know his people's language, decided to join the Ukrainian movement in the army. The brothers Ukrainianized the military units and took on the name Omelyanovych-Pavlenko in honor of their grandfather — Omelyan Pavlenko. "From this time, I had to closely link my fate with that of the Ukrainian People", Mykhailo Volodymyrovych wrote later in exile. During the time of the Ukrainian Central Rada, he was the head of the military detachment of Yekaterinoslav (modern-day Dnipro), organized the Free Cossacks – volunteer military-police formations, as well as the Haidamak regiment. He worked in Kyiv and Odesa under the orders of the military ministry of the UНР.

In political disputes, he attempted to remain uninvolved. In October 1918, during the time of the Hetmanate of Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Mykhailo Omelyanovych-Pavlenko was awarded the rank of General-Horunzhy. The following month, after the capitulation of the Central Powers in World War I, the Anti-Hetman uprising began on November 14, 1918. "I have never seen salvation in discord," — these words of the general characterized his position. Thus, soon, at the invitation of the ZUNR government, Mykhailo Volodymyrovych led the Initial Command of the Ukrainian Galician Army from December 1918 until early June of the following year. After the November Act, a bloody Polish-Ukrainian conflict began in Eastern Galicia. Mykhailo Volodymyrovych traveled along with the UGA and, together with the remnants of the Galician army, crossed the Zbruch.

The Directorate of the UНР and the evacuated government of the ZUNR never managed to find common ground: most leaders from the Dnipro region were representatives of socialist parties, which found it difficult to negotiate with the conservative Galicians. At the same time, the Entente insisted on an alliance between the White Russian Volunteer Army and the UНР army. Regarding the reasons for the lack of support for the Ukrainians' struggle for statehood from the Entente countries, Ukrainian historian Father Isidore Nahaiivskyi wrote: "The Entente, focusing on the elimination of Bolshevism, had no clear idea of what post-tsarist Russia would look like after the destruction of Bolshevism. Tsarist émigré diplomats convinced Clemenceau that if the Entente severed Ukraine from the future democratic Russia, this 'new Russia' would not fulfill the expectations placed on it to be a strong counterbalance to the 'German Drang nach Osten' (from German "Drang nach Osten" — "Push to the East". — Ed.) or anywhere in Europe, and this was more frightening to the French, which is why Clemenceau did not support Ukraine's right to self-determination. He believed the tsarist émigrés would manage with the Bolsheviks without the Ukrainians."

Perhaps because, having broad – both financial and military – support from the victorious Entente in 1919, the commander of the Volunteer Army (Western countries, for some reason, considered the White Guards as 'democrats') semi-Polish Anton Denikin completely disregarded the state aspirations of Ukrainians and even Poles. For negotiations with the Denikin forces, who crushed the Reds in the summer of 1919, occupied Left Bank Ukraine, and crossed the Dnipro, Symon Petliura ordered the creation of a commission led by Mykhailo Omelyanovych-Pavlenko to establish a demarcation line. As Alexander Dotsenko wrote in his book "Chronicle of the Ukrainian Revolution," the commander of Denikin's army in Ukraine, General Nikolai Bredov, "stated that he would not recognize the Dnipro army, would not accept General Omelyanovych-Pavlenko, and that when he appeared, he would be arrested." It was in July 1919 that General Mykhailo Omelyanovych-Pavlenko returned almost alongside the retreating army of the West Ukrainian People's Republic to the territory of the Dnipro region and rejoined the ranks of the Active Army of the UНР.

The level of disorganization within this army was starkly illustrated by the capture of Kyiv on August 31, 1919. When at 10 a.m. the Ukrainian army (Galicians under General Antin Kravs and the Zaporizhzhia group) entered the city without a fight, having been abandoned by the Reds, within just two hours, troops of the Volunteer Army entered the city from the left bank of the Dnipro. What followed, according to Symon Petliura, was the "Kyiv disaster": the White Russians "unexpectedly" began disarming the Ukrainian units, which had been ordered to avoid combat with the Denikin forces and were unprepared for resistance.

Panic ensued, and the White Russians effectively expelled the Ukrainian units from the city, which retreated to Fastiv. Many are familiar with the incident involving the removal of the Russian flag from the Merchant Assembly building (now the National Philharmonic), which resulted in gunfire and the deaths of ten cavalrymen from the "Black Zaporizhzhia." Attempts to negotiate with the White Russians ended in failure. The following day, September 1, 1919, a decree from General Bredov was posted in Kyiv, which included words emphasizing the imperial policy of the Denikin forces: "...from now on and forever, Kyiv returns to the composition of the united and indivisible Russia."

It was in this critical situation that Mykhailo Omelyanovych-Pavlenko took command of the army of the Directorate of the UНР. The strange situation with the typhus epidemic in Ukraine (possibly caused by sabotage; vials containing the pathogens of