Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko

In the early phase of the 1939–1940 Soviet-Finnish War (Winter War), the Red Army suffered repeated bloody defeats against the Mannerheim Line under Kliment Voroshilov's command. At a Supreme Military Council meeting on 7 January 1940, Stalin asked who would take command. After a long silence, Timoshenko stood and replied: 'If you give me everything we have discussed here, I am ready to take command and, I hope, will not let you down.' Appointed commander of the North-Western Front, he immediately overhauled tactics: tanks were pulled back from the front, heavy artillery was massed, and ski groups and snipers modelled on Finnish units were sharply expanded. By early February he had concentrated 25 divisions on the western Karelian Isthmus. On 1 February alone, some 3,000 shells fell on the Summa fortified area. This was the heaviest artillery bombardment since Verdun in World War I. The bombardment cracked the Mannerheim Line, the breakthrough began in mid-February, and Vyborg fell. On 13 March 1940 the USSR signed peace on its own terms. Timoshenko was awarded Hero of the Soviet Union and promoted to Marshal on 21 March.

On 11 September 1939, as the Red Army prepared its operation into Western Ukraine, the field administration of the Kiev Special Military District was used to form the Ukrainian Front. Command of the front was given to the Kiev district commander, Army Commander 1st Rank Semyon Timoshenko; the front staff passed to Nikolai Vatutin, and the Military Council included Nikita Khrushchev as secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. The front staff was located in Kiev, while its armies deployed as the Shepetovka, Volochisk, Kamenets-Podolsk and Odessa army groups.

A directive of the USSR People's Commissar for Defence Kliment Voroshilov and Chief of the General Staff Boris Shaposhnikov (No. 16634, 14 September 1939) ordered the troops to concentrate secretly by the morning of 16 September and be ready to attack with the aim of smashing the opposing Polish forces; on 17 September the front's troops entered the composition of the active army. The operation therefore opened on 17 September, sixteen days after the German invasion of Poland, without a formal Soviet declaration of war, on the official justification of protecting the life and property of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

The political and legal frame of the operation must be stated plainly. It implemented the secret protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty and amounted to a de facto partition of Poland between the USSR and Nazi Germany, sometimes called a 'fourth' partition. Soviet historiography terms the campaign the 'liberation campaign of the Red Army', Polish historiography the 'Soviet invasion of Poland'. From 28 September the front fielded the 5th, 6th and 12th armies plus the Odessa and cavalry army groups, and on 29 September the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and the Boundary was signed, after which the troops halted on the line reached and, from 5 October, withdrew to the new border line along the rivers Igorka, Volkushanka, Pissa, Narew, Bug and San.

As material results, by 5 October the troops had taken 657 guns and mortars, 131,232 rifles and carbines, 5,242 machine guns, 117,450 shells and mines, 20 million cartridges, 110,100 hand grenades, and 51 warships and over 113 auxiliary vessels of the Polish river flotilla on the Pripyat, with 394,498 prisoners of war on the front's books, counting soldiers and officers of the Polish Army, police and gendarmes, and persons taken with arms in hand. Prisoner totals differ between sources and should be given as attributed, approximate figures rather than a single precise number.

After the military phase the front's political organs supported the creation of temporary local self-government and the elections to the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine. On 1 October 1939 the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted a programme for the incorporation of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus into the USSR, setting elections for 22 October and the assembly for 26 October; on 27-29 October the People's Assembly in Lviv declared the establishment of Soviet power in Western Ukraine and its reunification with the Ukrainian SSR, and on 1-2 November 1939 the USSR Supreme Soviet granted the request for incorporation into the Soviet Union. This administrative integration, following the October 1939 orders on military administration, is a documented part of the phase and should be presented as occupation and annexation with its political mechanics, neither as a purely benign 'liberation' nor as a bare conquest without the accompanying social and electoral processes.

One difference of account remains. The biography material describes his Polish campaign command as running from 17 September to 2 October, with the combat task successfully fulfilled and Lviv entered, whereas the front's own operational span is recorded as 17 September to 5 October. The entry into Lviv is supported, but the two spells should not be conflated without noting the discrepancy.