In this position there ensued a curious tug of war. With the two Empires still nominally at peace, each was doing its best to sponsor a movement that would redound to its advantage in case of war. Neither one was willing to take any action or embark upon a course that would benefit the Ukrainians themselves. Austria would not establish a separate Ukrainian province which could appear openly in the Parliament and speak freely for the Ukrainian citizens of the Dual Monarchy. Russia would not grant such privileges to the Ukrainians in her own land as would prevent them from looking across the border. She regularly repressed Ukrainian meetings held on the anniversary of the death of Shevchenko, even in St. Petersburg, and continued the monotonous list of arrests and annoying restrictions on all Ukrainian activities. Even such a man as Milyukov could not fail to see that the policy of the government was working to strengthen a movement for Ukrainian separatism, at the very moment when it was trying to Russianize the Ukrainians of Galicia, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina. In this crisis the Ukrainians showed their lack of political maturity. They had been so absorbed in the struggle to lay the foundations for their survival and revival that they had had no opportunity to prepare their position before the outside world. Their great writers and thinkers were less well known abroad than were the leading figures of any other great people. They did not have the control of a single university which would make them known to the world of scholars. They did not have any outstanding figures, known abroad, to plead their cause before neutral opinion and they did not realize that their claims would be evaluated in foreign lands in accordance with the national prejudices of those countries toward the two great Empires which were quarreling over their possession.