UNDO was essentially democratic in nature, guided by varying amounts of Catholic, liberal, and socialist ideology.

[3] UNDO supported constitutional democracy and the "organic development" of Ukrainian society that would prepare it for independence once the opportunity arose.

[7] For example, UNDO's representatives in the Polish parliament joined their Jewish colleagues in voting against an attempt to limit kosher slaughtering.

"[7] Despite its rejection of violence and discrimination against Jews, UNDO also engaged in an economic struggle against them by supporting Ukrainian cooperatives through boycotting non-Ukrainian (and thus, often, Jewish) businesses.

[7] Seeing Poland as the main enemy, in the 1920s while Soviet Ukraine was experiencing a cultural revival, a significant segment of the UNDO leadership had a pro-Soviet orientation.

[4] Dmytro Levytsky, party leader, wrote in 1925, "We are firmly convinced that, much like abstract communism, the Soviet form of government is alien to the mindset of the Ukrainian nation.

Therefore, we state the well-known and unquestionable fact that the national idea is growing, strengthening, and developing in Soviet Ukraine.

UNDO's representatives in the Polish parliament led the Ukrainian delegation in sponsoring a motion condemning these acts.

Laws were passed that stipulated that only people who could speak and write Polish could serve as county or city officials, and four-fifths of Ukrainian judges were removed from their positions or transferred to Central and Western Poland.

[10] By 1932, the relentless Polish pressure combined with the perception, based in part on the Holodomor and other Soviet atrocities affecting the Ukrainian population, that the Soviet Union, not Poland was Ukraine's principal enemy, induced many UNDO's leaders to seek some sort of accommodation with the Polish government.

[10] Because the Poles were only willing to apply concessions to Galicia, and not to Volhynia, UNDO's leader Dmytro Levytsky resigned from his post as head of the party.

At the same time, Germany's puppet government in Czechoslovakia granted autonomy to Slovakia's ethnic Ukrainian region, Carpatho-Ukraine.

[13] After the Soviets annexed Eastern Poland, UNDO's former leader, Dr. Dmytro Levitsky, who had once been chief of the Ukrainian delegation in the pre-war Polish parliament, as well as many of his colleagues, were arrested, deported to Moscow, and never heard from again.