medieval Kievan Rus'. A Ukrainian sich (military camp) outside the Rusyn capital, Uzhhorod, was, under German tutelage, training Ukrainians from southeastern Poland for prospective action in Poland jointly with Germany. This constituted a clear and present danger to the Polish population just across the Carpathian Mountains in largely Ukrainian-populated southeastern Poland, as Adolf Hitler worked to complete a near-total encirclement of Poland on her north, west and south while Poland's eastern frontier faced a hostile Soviet Union. Hungary had ruled Carpathian Rus from the Middle Ages until defeated in World War I, and had been lobbying Adolf Hitler to sanction Hungary's repossession of Rus. Following the Polish-Hungarian covert operations in Carpathian Rus, under the First Vienna Award in November 1938, Hungary received some largely Hungarian-populated areas of Carpathian Rus. Further coordinated Polish-Hungarian partisan operations ultimately led to the restoration, in mid-March 1939, of Hungarian sovereignty over all of Carpathian Rus and the re-establishment of the historic common Polish-Hungarian border. Six months later, during the invasion of Poland in September 1939, that common border would become of pivotal importance when Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy's grateful government, as a matter of "Hungarian honor", declined Hitler's request to transit German forces across Rus into southeastern Poland to speed Poland's conquest. This in turn allowed the Polish government and tens of thousands of Polish military personnel to escape into neighboring Romania and Hungary, and from there to France and French-mandated Syria to carry on operations as the third-strongest Allied belligerent after Britain and France. Before the outbreak of World War II, for his part in the Carpathian operation, Kasparek received the Cross of Valor (Krzyż Walecznych). After the war, in Britain, General Bolesław Bronisław Duch heard of the operation from other participants and nominated Kasparek for Poland's highest military decoration, the Virtuti Militari. At the session of the kapituła (chapter), however, the nomination was blocked by General Władysław Anders after Duch adamantly opposed Anders' own nomination of his paymaster for the Virtuti Militari. World War II Kasparek fought in defense of Poland during the country's invasion in September 1939. A particular turning point in the September Campaign for Kasparek, which likely saved his life, occurred when he was sent to Żółkiew for maps and, at 16th-century Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski's castle, met Colonel Stanisław Maczek (who later in the war, in Great Britain, would become commander of the Polish First Armored Division). Maczek transferred Kasparek,