On 5 December 1918, the Republic's delegates issued the statement: "We, the Rusyn nation, living in a compact settlement in the southern parts of the Galician administrative units of Nowy Targ and in Sanok. Do not wish to be incorporated into the Polish state, and wish to share the fate of our Rusyn brothers [living] in Spiš, Šariš, and Zemplín counties as one indivisible geographic and ethnographic unit."[3]