Between 1914 and 1918 the army of the Russian tsar had contained more than 3 million Ukrainian conscripts, and the Austro-Hungarian army had included an additional 250,000. Many of these peasant-soldiers had shot at one another across the muddy trenches of Galicia.8 But after the war ended, some 300,000 men who had been serving in “Ukrainianized” battalions, composed of Ukrainian peasants, declared their loyalty to the new state. Some brought back weapons and joined the new Central Rada militia.
