[1] During that period, he repeatedly had to defend the Galician Ukrainians whom the local administration, consisting predominantly of Poles, was arresting under suspicion of disloyalty to Austria-Hungary.

He also served as a liaison between the Ukrainian community leaders and Austria's Emperor Charles I, whom Wilhelm had known since childhood and was even able to pay him an official visit in the beginning of 1917.

[1] The most acceptable course to solve the "Ukrainian issue", for Wilhelm, was the creation of an autonomous Grand Duchy of Ukraine with federalist principles, within the Habsburg monarchy (see United States of Greater Austria).

[1] That duchy, beside the Eastern Galicia and Bukovina provinces, could include as well Ukrainian lands that at that time belonged to the Russian Empire and which had to be reconquered.

[1] Some researchers (e.g. Timothy Snyder) claim that Wilhelm saw himself as an ideal candidate for the role of head of state for the duchy, first of all because he was as a member of the ruling family, and second as one who already knew the language and had authority among the Ukrainians.

[1] According to other historians, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi personally did not lay a claim to the "Ukrainian throne" and later wrote about it stating that he would lead Ukraine only in the case that a majority of its residents desired so.

[1] At first the Austrian forces entered the already liberated Kherson and later for two months left in Aleksandrovsk (today Zaporizhzhia) where the Archduke began a series of turbulent missions: building connections between the Galician riflemen and local population, cooperating with the local public organization of Prosvita, and attempting to lift military spirit, visiting iconic sites of Cossack history along with his subordinates.

[1] His troops occupied a small area near the site of the old Zaporozhian Sich, and were tasked with supporting the Ukrainian national cause in any way possible.

[1] In circles of the Zaporizhzhia Division officers, a plan was formed to overthrow the Hetman and place Archduke Wilhelm Habsburg as sovereign of Ukraine.

[3] Wilhelm and his soldiers were finally recalled out of Ukraine in October 1918 due to the revolutionary conditions there,[1] moving to the Austrian Duchy of Bukovina.

[citation needed] As he lay in the hospital, World War I ended, Austria-Hungary fell apart, and the Habsburgs lost their throne.

[6] In June 1919, while traveling across Carpathians, Wilhelm was arrested by Romanian soldiers and detained for three months until on petition of the Ukrainian People's Republic he was released.

[1] According to laws of the newly formed Austrian Republic, every Habsburg might become a citizen as well as obtaining residency only if they would officially abandon any claims to govern.

[1] In 1935 or 1934[1] he became enmeshed in a criminal case in which his girlfriend Paulette Couyba tried with a help of false bank check to swindle a French investor (dealers of alcohol)[1] of hundreds of thousands of francs.

[1] The arrested woman at first pleaded guilty, but later began to shift the blame on Wilhelm, stating that the ill-gotten money was supposed to go to return Habsburgs to power.

[1] The researcher, as some contemporaries of Wilhelm did too, does not exclude that it was a deliberate diversion by some foreign intelligence forces (i.e. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union) supposing to strike the Habsburgs' reputation and prevent their restoration.

[1] After he and his brother Karl Albrecht were arrested and interrogated by Gestapo, Wilhelm changed his political views and soon joined the local anti-Nazi resistance in Vienna.

[1] It is uncertain when Wilhelm turned against the Nazis, but according to Snyder he was possibly already spying for some intelligence services, potentially the British SIS which financed and supported resistance movements throughout the whole of Europe, by the start of 1942.

[1] Through Novosad in 1944, Wilhelm heard about someone by the name of Lidia Tulchyn who was a contact for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera faction (her real name Hanna Prokopych).

[1] At the end of war, the Ukrainian nationalists became aware that their chance to survive facing the Soviet threat was an alliance with western winning countries.

[1] In March 1947 at his apartment in the American occupation zone of Vienna, Kachorovsky too loudly celebrated his birthday and upset neighbors called the police.

[1] The Ministry of State Security (MGB) Counter-Intelligence Department (SMERSH) of the Central Group of Forces that was based in Austria was already interested in Kachorovsky and several months before tried to detain him, but he then managed to fight them off and flee.

[1] After interrogations of Kachorovsky, the MGB became aware of Roman Novosad and Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, while the latter obviously had previously been trapped in field of vision of the Soviet secret service.

[1] The investigators were pretty interested in the Wilhelm's distant past and his personal contacts with figures of the First Liberation War i.e. Petro Bolbochan, Symon Petliura, Pavlo Skoropadskyi,[1] but the most attention was paid to cooperation with Maas, Pélissier, and Lidia Tulchyn.

[1] Also in earlier protocols Wilhelm said that the meeting near Innsbruck was dedicated to not making contacts between Frenchmen and OUN, but towards the fate of Ukrainians in the camps for displaced people.

[1] "My stay in Ukraine was the result of an aggressive policy of Austria-Hungary imperialistic and ruling circles", but Wilhelm hardly spoke in such Soviet propagandistic clichés.

[1] In November 1947 the chekists of the Central Group of Forces decided to transfer the case and the arrested to their Ukrainian colleagues and before the New Year they brought them to Kyiv.

[1] They also filed an extract from a book "Ukrainskie sechevye streltsy" that was published in Lwow in 1935 mentioning about the stay of Wilhelm in Ukraine's south in 1918.

[1] Novosad's list was smaller: belonging to the nationalist organization "Sich" (in reality it was a society of Ukrainian students in Vienna established in 1868), connections with Wilhelm and OUN and working for English and French intelligence services.

[1] In fact, the decision was made by Limarchenko who signed the indictment: he was asking the Special Meeting sentenced both to 25 years of forced labor camps.