The term “Ukraine” derives from the meaning “at the extremity,” referring to the area's early location at the periphery of the Russian and Polish spheres of influence. During the final stages of World War I and in the immediate postwar period, the semi-autonomous Ukraine served as a seedbed of extremist movements and ideas, as right-wing Germans interacted with anti-Bolshevik Whites on a large scale for the first time. After the Imperial Russian Army collapsed because of military reverses and internal revolution, Imperial German occupying forces in the Ukraine formed a largely clandestine common front with Whites against the fledgling Bolshevik regime to the north.

Although Imperial German efforts to establish a stable Ukrainian satellite state ultimately failed because of German military reverses on the distant Western Front and revolution at home, the alliance between right-wing Germans and Whites in the Ukraine strengthened pro-German sentiments throughout the White movement. The German Ukrainian Intervention established a precedent for further large-scale nationalist German–Russian military collaboration, notably as conducted along the Baltic Sea in Latvia during 1919. The international anti-Bolshevik cooperation that began in the Ukraine ultimately fostered close National Socialist collaboration with White émigrés.

German military personnel retreating from the Ukraine around the turn of the year 1918/1919 took thousands of pro-nationalist German White officers with them, and many other Whites who had participated in anti-Bolshevik operations in or just outside the Ukraine traveled to Germany through other means.