Their dilemma was only increased by the long period of hesitation on the part of the Great Powers at Paris and elsewhere. These wavered so continuously between support of Russian unification and aid to the various separatist groups that they were unable to exert their full power to bring about any satisfactory settlement. Step by step they had allowed the Russian Bolsheviks to infiltrate into the various national republics that had been set up, and finally only Finland and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had direct access to the sea, survived. At the same time their policy had failed to gain support for the White Russians even in purely Russian territory and had only succeeded in producing exactly the opposite results of what they wished. It might seem that the Ukrainian problem had thus been settled in a way that was to be permanent. Yet it had become more serious than before and it had been definitely pushed on to the international arena, whether they wished it or not. Exactly as the Kozak wars had removed Ukraine from a purely Polish problem, so now the Ukrainian ghost was to be present at all international gatherings, whether it was mentioned or not. It is not too much to say that the final collapse of the Ukrainian national government awoke far larger masses of the population to the reality of the question than had even the Ukrainian declaration of independence, and for that reason the name of Ukraine began to play an even more important role on the map of Europe than it had done before. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE _WESTERN UKRAINE_ By the summer of 1919 Polish military control had been extended over the whole of Western Ukraine and the alliance between Petlyura and the Polish government early in 1920 ratified the dismemberment of the joint state which had been so enthusiastically proclaimed a year before. Finally the Treaty of Riga between Poland and the Soviets secured from the latter the recognition of Polish control. There remained only one hope for the exiled government of Western Ukraine, and that was the Council of Ambassadors of the victorious Allies. They held out as did the Peace Conference against Polish control of the country but their opposition steadily diminished. France was strongly backing Poland and the Conference as a whole had no definite ideas as to the future. It definitely awarded Western Galicia to Poland, but on November 20, 1919 there was adopted a resolution providing that Poland should hold Eastern Galicia for twenty-five years under a mandate from the League of Nations, that there should be an Eastern Galician Diet with a representative in the Polish cabinet, that there should be broad autonomy for the province, and that at the end of the period there should be a plebiscite. Poland naturally refused to accept this solution and there was no one of the Allied Powers that was willing and able to enforce its decision.