Osadniks (, "settler/settlers, colonist/colonists") were veterans of the Polish Army and civilians who were given or sold state land in the Kresy (current Western Belarus and Western Ukraine) territory ceded to Poland by Polish-Soviet Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 (and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939 and ceded to it after World War II). The Polish word was also a loanword that was used in the Soviet Union. Settlement process Shortly before the Battle of Warsaw on August 7, 1920, Polish Prime Minister Wincenty Witos announced that after the war, volunteers and soldiers who served on the front would have priority in purchase of state-owned land, while the soldiers to receive medals for bravery would receive land free of charge. The announcement was partly to repair the Polish morale, shaken after the retreat from the east. On December 17 the Sejm (Polish parliament) passed the Act on Nationalization of North-Eastern Powiats of the Republic and Act on Granting the Soldiers of the Polish Army with Land. Both acts allowed the demobilised soldiers to apply for land parcels. The acts of parliament applied for powiats of Grodno and Wołożyn of Białystok Voivodeship, as well as 20 other powiats in the eastern voivodeships of Poland. In the spring of 1921, the first groups of settlers arrived to newly-established settlements in Wołyń. According to the Polish historian Lidia Głowacka, they were in what had been the property of major landowners: the Russian treasury ("kazyonnye zemli") and the tsar's family, some secularised monasteries or lands abandoned by the Russian nobility retreating from the area before the German arrival in 1915. Some land was also purchased by the state from the Polish nobility. A typical plot of land had the area of under 20 hectares, but soldiers with a university diploma could in theory receive up to 45 hectares free of charge, to create the so-called exemplary farms. In reality, however, there were more applicants than free land and even the recipients of the Virtuti Militari medal had to pay for their plots. Although the government promised help to the settlers, most of them received little but the land itself. Some regiments in which the soldiers had served provided them with forage and demobilized horses. The cost of the land itself was to be repaid by the settlers five years after the start of the programme, with the yearly rent set at 30–100 kg