During the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 his unit was attached to the 3rd Polish Army and took part in the pursuit of fleeing Bolshevik and Soviet forces at the Battle of the Niemen. Following the Battle of Warsaw, Żeligowski wrote:"There was a paradoxical situation .. when Warsaw was defended and the war was won, we, the citizens of our homeland - Lithuania, could not even return to the house where the Zhmudin people settled, protégé of the Germans ... Having lost Lithuania - Poland lost much of its statehood. Polish politicians didn't understand that, only every soldier, even a Lithuanian citizen, understood that." Republic of Central Lithuania In October 1920, Żeligowski, a native of historical lands of Lithuania, was chosen to command the 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Infantry Division, composed mainly of P.O.W. members, volunteers and partisans from the territory of modern Belarus and Lithuania. On October 8, 1920, after a staged mutiny, he "defected" with his unit and took control over the city of Vilnius and its area. The mutiny, named after him, would be remembered as the defining moment of his life. On October 12, he proclaimed independence of the said area as Republic of Central Lithuania, with Wilno as its capital. Initially a de facto military dictator, after the parliamentary elections he passed his powers to the newly elected parliament, which in turn decided to submit the area to Poland. According to Lucjan Żeligowski's point of view:"But not only geographically, Lithuania was the heart of the Slavs. It was morally. She, one of all the Slavic peoples, could easily talk with everyone. As with Poland, so with Russia, so with Ukraine. The mentality of the Lithuanian peoples was, as it were, created to reconcile everyone. He never had hostility, neither national, nor religious, nor cultural."Regarding his invasion of Lithuania in October 1920, Żeligowski wrote:On 9 October 1920, with the army, made up of the sons of Lithuania and Belarus, Vilnius was occupied not by the Polish general Żeligowski, but by the Lithuanian Żeligowski, who came as a child from to Vilnius for school exams and spent the night on the benches of city parks. In the 14th-century Lithuanian Chronicles, there was written about mobilization in Ašmena, where it was mentioned that Jokūbas Želigovskis had a horse, weapon, axe, etc. In the history of a Russian uhlan regiment from 1863, it was mentioned that in the surroundings of after