As regards Bukovina, the Ukrainians occupied the capital Chernivtsy on November 3, but the Romanians with the nucleus of an army refused to concede this. Their troops on Armistice Day pressed into the city and overthrew the Ukrainian Regional Committee under Omelyan Popovich. Then they formally annexed the province. In Carpatho-Ukraine, there was the same general confusion. Various adherents of the Republic of Western Ukraine held gatherings in Preshiv, Uzhorod and Hust and they failed to come to a definite agreement as to the future of the country. The Czechs claimed it on the basis of an understanding with the American Ruska Nationalna Rada at a meeting in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There was, however, more delay in taking the land over from Hungary than there was from some of the other sections and there was not the complete change that had occurred elsewhere. Nevertheless on January 21, 1919, a Council in Hust voted to join Ukraine; but conditions kept changing and finally on May 5 the various groups in the country voted to become autonomous within the Czechoslovak state. It can be seen from all this that the Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia were the heart and the determining factor of the Republic of Western Ukraine. The loss of Lviv, the most important city in the area, proved a tremendous handicap to the new state, which looked forward very definitely to an ultimate union with the Ukrainian Republic set up at Kiev. The Allied military missions in Warsaw and in Lviv endeavored to make peace between the various factions and to throw the whole problem of Eastern Galicia into the hands of the Peace Conference which was to meet a few months later in Paris. They were completely helpless, for the Poles claimed control of the entire province on the ground that it had been under the Polish crown and formed part of the Polish Republic since the fourteenth century and the Polish leaders, both of the right and left, refused to listen to any pleas that would leave the territory even temporarily under Ukrainian control. At the same time, they were steadily increasing their armed forces and later they received several well-trained divisions which had fought under General Haller along with the French on the Western Front. Under such conditions the armies of Western Ukraine were steadily forced to retreat to the east in the hope of joining the forces of Eastern Ukraine, which were in little better condition. There is little need to go into the various efforts that were made at the time to make peace between the Poles and Western Ukrainians. All of them failed. During the entire Peace Conference, there was continuous talk of the future fate of Galicia but nothing definite was decided, for the Poles, with French backing, refused to concede anything and the changing political situation in the East made decisions useless, often before they were announced.