Firstly, the Bolsheviks did manage to reclaim Ukraine and Belarus which became among the first SSRs when the Soviet Union was declared in 1922. So Moscow did gain back a not insignificant chunk of pre-1917 Russian territory. Nonetheless, the independence of other areas was quite notable. The preservation of the Baltics, Finland, and Russian Poland was due to a set of converging geopolitical factors as well as the Bolsheviks' own revolutionary gambles not paying off.

One of the important rationales behind Lenin's acceptance of Brest-Litovsk was that state authority in these ceded areas was already dissolving. Finland, for instance, had already had its own revolution in March 1917 and made moves towards declaring independence throughout the following summer. Much of these areas were battlezones and burdened with refugees as well as a destroyed economy. Although Lenin was an outspoken proponent of a formal peace treaty with the Central Powers, he was outnumbered by figures like Trotsky whose proposal was "no peace, no war," and that the new post-October Revolution government would unilaterally leave the war without a treaty. Lenin though recognized that leaving matters open would invite a degree of chaos and that the stabilization of a treaty would give time for revolutionary forces to gather steam.

Such a thing had appeared to happen in Finland where the Bolsheviks had recognized Finland's national independence in the hopes that its Marxist parties would band together in common cause with the Russian Bolsheviks to form a common goal of a global revolution. Lenin gambled with Brest-Litovsk that while Germany would choke on its brief gains, the situation would favor a proletarian uprising within Germany itself. While Lenin proved right on his first hedged bet, he failed on his second. The forces for revolution in both the Central Powers either tended to be weak or did not want to cede complete control over to their Russian counterparts. Finland again showed the poverty of this stratagem wherein the more Bolshevik-aligned factions lost out to more conservative and nationalist groups.

The failure of various Bolsheviks-style parties to gain traction within the former imperial periphery forced a much more proactive stance on the part of Moscow to retain control over these areas. However, the Bolsheviks were far from the only interested party in the fate of these contested borderlands. The Western Allies tended to look at the territories "freed" by Brest-Litovsk as independent countries with a right to national self-determination. Wilsonian ideal played an important justification to support them, but this also dovetailed with the hostility to the Bolsheviks and a desire to erect what Clemenceau called a cordon sanitaire around the nascent Bolshevik state. This cordon policy meant both supporting national independence movements as well as sending surplus materials and "volunteers" to help White forces within Ukraine as the Russian Civil War heated up. While the support of the Allies did not prove decisive for the Whites, it did help in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. British naval support in the Baltics broke the back of the surviving Bolshevik fleet.

The Western Allies in this region had a strange bedfellow in the form of the Germans. Although they had lost the war, the armistice did not mean that German war materials went away or that every German soldier demobilized. Ober Ost, the German high command for the East, had maintained a vision of a Germanic empire within this region and defeat did not dim this chimera in the minds of some German officers and soldiers. Ober Ost had already transferred some war materials to friendly national groups as the November armistice loomed, but wider defeat saw the formation of independent German Freikorps that would operate in northeast Europe. These Freikorps were nominally allies of various Baltic governments and White forces, but they often operated with an eye to immediate plunder and forming an independent Germanic state in this region. These well-armed troops did help various White and Baltic forces fight off the relatively poorly-equipped and trained Red armies in the early stages of the Civil War. But once the Bolshevik threat receded, there was much greater pressure both within the Baltics and among the Western Allies to disband the Freikorps, and their numbers were much too small to establish an independent state.

Of course, the various new governments in these disputed areas also had a say in their own destinies. Various Polish nationalists perceived the war as an opportunity to resurrect a Polish state and they often played both sides against each other during the conflict. The collapse of the Central Powers led to an Allied recognition of Poland and the French in particular saw a strong Polish state as a vital ally in Eastern Europe that would not only keep the cordon sanitaire active, but would monitor Germany. In a seesaw of military fortunes, the Polish armed forces would try to spread into Ukraine and Belarus for a maximal Polish state, only to over-extend themselves and be pushed back. The Red Army would repeat this trajectory in 1920 with an invasion that reached the outskirts of Warsaw only to be overextended and pushed back. The result was a Polish-Soviet border which remained until the Soviet invasion of 1939.

This is of course massively oversimplifying an incredibly complex state of events between 1918 and 1922. The West's acceptance of the independence of these territories and its rejection of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were two separate issues. National independence for the Baltics, Poland, and the Finns suited the geostrategy of the victorious Allies. After initially championing national self-determination in the confused politics of 1917, Lenin and company soon tacked to a more controlled use of the nationalist card which only accepted national liberation movements if they served the greater cause of world revolution. The Bolsheviks' campaign against the Ukrainian Rada was proof of this turn to a more tactical employment of nationalism. The nascent Bolshevik power was able to keep some of the major territories ceded to the Germans from the various forces that wanted to pry them away from Moscow. But for other states on the former imperial periphery, the constellation of forces that wanted their independence was strong enough to preserve it.