Battle of Bystryk
1920 battle
The Battle of Bystrzyk happened on 31 May 1920 near the village of Bystryk near Kyiv. It was a part of the ill-fated offensive of the Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army assault on the Polish-Ukrainian troops defending Kyiv after their offensive on Kyiv a month earlier, during the Polish-Bolshevik War.
The Bolshevik assault started on 26 May, with the aim of cutting off the Polish 2nd and 3rd Armies and encircling them in a huge pocket. One of the assaulting divisions of the Cavalry Army, the Soviet 11th Cavalry Division, managed to break the front line between the two Polish armies and assaulted a fortified village of Bystrzyk, defended only by a single infantry company of the Polish 50th Kresy Rifles Regiment. After a short skirmish, the Poles were defeated. As the Cossack cavalry took no prisoners, all 75 Poles were killed, including prisoners and wounded in action. The exact Russian losses are unknown. Shortly after the skirmish, the commander of the Polish 13th Infantry Division, Gen. Franciszek Paulik, dispatched the reserve Polish 40th Infantry Regiment, but it was too late to relieve the defenders of Bystryk and the regiment lacked enough firepower to defeat an entire division. Because of that, the Polish tactical counter-offensive was repelled.
“Battle of Bystryk” enters the record as 1920 battle. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Battle, Bystryk and battle can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Bystryk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.