1918
On November 1st, Ukrainian forces occupied L’viv, which triggered war with the Poles, who wanted Galicia to be part of the newly created Polish Republic. Polish forces succeeded in capturing L’viv on November 21st, and the Romanian army occupied Bukovyna in Ukraine's southwest. Nevertheless, for some time to come, most of Galicia remained under the control of a Ukrainian government. Since the late 18th century, Ukrainian lands had been controlled by the Austrian and Russian empires, which together with Prussia had erased Poland from the map. Then, during WWI, Austria and Russia were at each other's throats. During the ensuing power vacuum in Western Ukraine, which was only augmented by the Bolshevik Revolution, several short-lived states sprang up until they all had fallen under the control of the Soviet Union. Until WWII, most of Western Ukraine then remained in the hands of the Poles, the Romanians as well as the Czechs.
1949
On November 21st, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR approved the republic's new flag: the upper horizontal stripe, constituting two-thirds of the flag, was red; the lower, azure. The upper part displayed the golden sickle, hammer and star. In 1919, the republic had got a red flag with the Cyrillic initials YPCP (for the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic) in gold standing in a red, gold-bordered canton. When Ukraine formally became part of the Soviet Union, a crossed golden hammer and sickle was added with a five-point star above them. The blue and yellow flag of today has its origins in western Ukraine. In 1848, during a convention in L’viv, a coat of arms was adopted. It consisted of a golden lion (L’viv means lion in Ukrainian) on a blue field. The colors soon became popular in Russian occupied Ukraine. Then when Ukraine first declared independence in 1918, a yellow field over a blue one was adopted as the country's national flag. The next year, a Hetmanate was set up under General Pavlo Skoropadsky, who introduced the blue field over the yellow one. By this time, the same pattern had also been adopted by a short-lived state set up in western Ukraine. However territory concurrently controlled by Zaporizhzhian Cossacks used a green and black flag. Only after independence in 1991 was the blue and yellow flag reintroduced.
1990
In November, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent the draft of a new Union Treaty to the country's legislature. The document proclaimed each republic to be a sovereign state with absolute power in its territory. However, the wording was tricky, reserving Moscow the right to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the USSR. Debates took place the next month. Trying to overcome the aspiration of the Union Republics for real independence, Gorbachev decided to put the question of the future of the USSR to a nation-wide referendum. The Ukrainian authorities chose to add a second question to the referendum: «Do you agree with the fact that Ukraine is to be in the Union of Soviet Sovereign States on the principles of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine?» A positive answer to this question in fact meant a vote for Ukrainian independence. The referendum was held the next spring, but both sides claimed victory, until the putsch at Gorbachev's dacha in August 1991 made the end of the USSR inevitable. On August 24, Ukrainian independence was proclaimed in the Rada.
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