Ukrainian Regional Committee

Ukrainian Regional Committee (Український крайовий комітет; Ukrainskyi kraiovyi komitet, or УКК; UKK). A body set up in Lviv in 1941 by the German authorities to represent the Ukrainian community, and the only legal Ukrainian civic institution in Galicia at the time. Its statute was similar to that of the Ukrainian Central Committee (UTsK) in Cracow. The Germans approved the general secretary of the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv, 1941, Kost K. Pankivsky, as chairman of the UKK. The vice-chairman and executive director was Mykhailo Dobriansky-Demkovych.

The departments of the UKK were organized in September–December 1941 and were headed by M. Rosliak and Mykola Tsenko (organizational), Yu. Savchak and Volodymyr Pushkar (financial), Volodymyr Lysy and Mykhailo Voloshyn (legal), Rev V. Lytsyniak and P. Sanotsky (social services), M. Bachynsky and then M. Mazuryk and P. Koniukh (economic), Zenon Zeleny (educational), Volodymyr Zubrytsky (cultural), Severyn Levytsky (youth affairs), M. Biliak and M. Zaiachkivska (women’s affairs), Toma Vorobets and I. Cherkavsky (prisoners’ aid), I. Trach (labor), and D. Kvasnytsia (auditing). Ukrainian okruha committees (UOKS), which were comparable to the Ukrainian relief committees (UDKS) operating under the Ukrainian Central Committee, were set up in the administrative areas introduced by the Germans, and trustees were installed in the villages.

The UKK assumed the tasks of furnishing relief to war victims, defending the Ukrainian population from arbitrary treatment by the occupational power, improving or at least tempering the difficult economic circumstances, widening the scope of its activities to support as many facets of national life as possible, and establishing as much influence as possible over government agencies which had an impact on the well-being of the population.

From the outset the UKK worked closely with the Ukrainian Central Committee. Its activities ceased in March 1942, when the Generalgouvernement administration decreed that the UTsK in Cracow would assume its functions. The similarity of their structures facilitated the merging of the two bodies, and Kost K. Pankivsky was subsequently made deputy head of the UTsK.

Besides its daily work in the fall of 1941 the UKK assisted in the return of Soviet officials to eastern Ukraine and in the release of Soviet prisoners of war from Galicia; organized relief for inmates of prisoners of war camps; set up public, factory, and school cafeterias; and promoted the establishment of gymnasiums and professional schools.

Mykhailo Dobriansky-Demkovych

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]