After World War I, the majority of Western European, Central European and North American countries established social security programs to provide assistance to disabled demobilized soldiers. However, the Polish Invalid Act of 1921 excluded disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army from the newly established welfare system, as they were soldiers who had fought against the Polish state. They were left without the government's financial support and the dominant Polish narrative described them as enemies of the state. The Lviv intelligentsia constructed the Ukrainian national narrative and the notion of "the Ukrainian war invalid" by establishing a system of assistance to disabled soldiers of the Galician army. Through the examination of the interaction between the Ukrainian Association for Aid to Disabled Soldiers and the authorities, Oksana Vynnyk analyzes the nuanced aspects of the relationships between government and Ukrainian civil society and shows that these relationships were an important aspect of state-building in interwar Poland. Speaker Oksana Vynnyk worked as an editorial assistant at Canadian Slavonic Papers, the journal of the Canadian Association of Slavists.
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