The proclamation of the Ukrainian National Council on 20 November 1917 ("the Third Universal of the Central Rada") offers a very different cartographic reference point from the maximalist ethnographic visions circulating in wartime Germany and Austria-Hungary. Rather than a nationalist projection drawn to persuade a foreign audience, this was an act of political self-definition by the body then governing in Kyiv, and its territorial claims were correspondingly more restrained and administratively grounded.
The Third Universal declared the Ukrainian People's Republic (Ukrainska Narodna Respublika) to encompass nine former provinces (guberniyas) of the Russian Empire: Kyiv, Podolia, Volhynia, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Kherson, and Taurida, the last excluding the Crimean peninsula itself, which was left for future determination given its distinct Tatar population. This produced a compact bloc of territory covering the central and southeastern reaches of what is now Ukraine, bounded roughly by the Dnister and the old Austro-Russian frontier in the west, the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coastline in the south, the Don Cossack lands in the east, and the Pripyat marshes and Belarusian guberniyas in the north.
The outer, ethnic line extends the map's scope considerably further west, enclosing Eastern Galicia, northern Bukovina, and Transcarpathia within the zone of Ukrainian ethnic settlement, even though these regions are shown as lying outside the political boundary and remaining under Austro-Hungarian rule. By plotting this second line, the map visually asserts that the Ukrainian nation's rightful extent exceeds the Republic's present borders, translating an irredentist political claim into a simple cartographic fact for its American viewers.
Read together, the two lines on the map stage the unfinished business of Ukrainian state-building as it stood in 1918: a functioning republic within one frontier, and a still-unrealized national territory within the other, with the gap between them corresponding to the claims later pressed, and ultimately lost, by the West Ukrainian People's Republic in Galicia and Bukovina in 1918–1919.
