Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

Now all Ukraine and most of Belarus (with the exception of its eastern lands) was under German or Austrian control. But the Germans treated the two nationalities differently: whereas the Ukrainian Rada had signed a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest, the Belarusian Rada was not invited to the negotiating table. Whereas Ukraine had a government recognized by Berlin and Vienna, the Belarusian lands were simply occupied by German troops with no provision for a separate state or government—the Brest treaty explicitly prohibited the recognition of any new state on the territory of the former Russian Empire. It was something of a repetition of the mid-seventeenth-century situation in which Ukraine became part of the tsar’s realm on the basis of special rights and conditions negotiated by the Cossacks, while Belarus was merely occupied by Muscovite troops with no such provisions.