Ukraine Committee [Український комітет], also known as the Ukraine (British) Committee – a group of individuals with an interest in Ukraine; active in 1913-1915 in London.
The Committee was formed on 16 March 1913 and its stated aims were to “popularise in England all and every question, political, economic, social, literary, musical, and scientific, concerning the Ukraine” and “develop in the Ukraine the intellectual and economic influence of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and standard of individual emancipation”.
The Committee’s founders were the writer George Raffalovich, the political activists Vladimir Stepankowsky and Marian Melenevsky, and the musicologist Francis Bartlett. In the summer of 1913 Stepankowsky left the Committee and from then it was run practically single-handedly by Raffalovich, the Honorary Secretary. A number of new members joined during 1913 and 1914, including the historian Robert William Seton-Watson.
The Committee maintained close links with the Ukrainian Information Committee in Lviv. After the outbreak of the First World War the Ukraine Committee sought to gain support for the Ukrainian movement in the English-speaking world. However, it soon lost influence when the UK entered the war as an ally of Russia. It ceased to exist in November 1915 when Raffalovich emigrated to the USA.
In 1914 a Memorandum on the Ukrainian Question in its National Aspect, compiled by Yaroslav Fedortchouk [Fedorchuk] on behalf of the Ukraine Committee and the Circle of Ukrainians in Paris, was published in London.
Bibliography
Saunders, D., 'Britain and the Ukrainian Question (1912-1920)', The English Historical Review (Oxford), vol. 103, no. 406, (January, 1988), pp. 40-68
Sereda, O., 'Anhliiski zviazky lvivskykh ukraintsiv naperedodni Pershoi svitovoi viiny', in Lviv: misto – suspilstvo – kultura (Lviv, 1999), pp. 431-452