It was regarded in Moscow and Kiev as an ethnic continuation of Ukraine, though part of the related local east Slav population considers itself distinctly Rusyn rather than Ukrainian: the Soviets saw it as part of the ethnic rectification of their western borders, while Prague saw no advantage in holding on to a rather remote and little developed province with which neither Czechs nor Slovaks had particular affinity. For the USSR it also offered territory beyond the Carpathians, and a frontier with Hungary, while to the Czechoslovak leaders it offered to speed Soviet military withdrawal, completed in December.

The western powers had declared that any border changes should await a general peace settlement, but seem to have raised no objection to what was seen as an affair of the two countries generally accepted on the Czechoslovak side.