Page "Joachim von Ribbentrop" Paragraph 60

In March 1939, Ribbentrop assigned the largely ethnic Ukrainian Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia region of Czecho-Slovakia, which had just proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, to Hungary, which then proceeded to annex it after a short war.

The significance of this lies in that there had been many fears in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that the Germans would use Ukrainian nationalism as a tool for breaking up the Soviet Union.

The establishment of an autonomous Ukrainian region in Czecho-Slovakia in October 1938 had promoted a major Soviet media campaign against its existence on the grounds that this was part of a Western plot to support separatism in the Soviet Ukraine.

By allowing the Hungarians to destroy Europe's only Ukrainian state, Ribbentrop had signified that Germany was not interested ( at least for the moment ) in sponsoring Ukrainian nationalism.

This in turn helped to improve German-Soviet relations by demonstrating that German foreign policy was now primarily anti-Western rather than anti-Soviet.