The history of Polish people in Transnistria goes back centuries when the communities along the lower Dniester river were part of Podolia in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Russian Empire.

In 1504 the Crimean Khanate conquered the southernmost portion of Transnistria south of the Iagorlîc/Jagorlyk river along with the rest of the Yedisan region which remained under the control of the Ottoman Empire until 1792.

Thus the border between the two states was set on the Iagorlîc river, referred to as the Iahurlîc in Moldavian chronicles,[1] and in Polish source as Jahorlik or Jahorłyk[2] Because of the massive slave raids and invasions launched by the Crimean Khanate, much of the southern region of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was sparsely populated.

Polish magnates from Ukraine played a significant political and social role within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as did the native nobility in these areas which Polonized over time.

Polish rule at this time involved the expansion of Jesuit schools and large scale construction of ornate castles and estates that included libraries, art collections, and archives that in many cases were the equal in importance to those in Poland itself.

[3] As a result of an anti-Russian insurrection in 1830, the Polish middle and poorer nobility were stripped of their legal noble status by the Russian government, and Russification policies were enacted.

[4] In spite of the ongoing migration of Poles from central Poland into Ukrainian lands,[3] by the end of the nineteenth century only three percent of the total population of these territories reported that Polish was their first language.

This trend increased in the late 1930s, as a result of the 1937-8 Polish Operation of the NKVD as well as the ceasing of educational instruction in the Moldavian ASSR for all non-Romanians populations in their native languages which was replaced by Ukrainian and Russian.