town, located in a spot where in 1485 hospodar Stephen III of Moldavia paid tribute to king Kazimierz IV Jagiellon.
After the outbreak of World War II with the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the town was thought of as one of the centers of Polish defense of the so-called Romanian Bridgehead.
Part of Soviet Union and World War II
However, the Soviet invasion from the east made these plans obsolete, and the town was occupied by the Red Army.
As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the occupied town became a part of the Soviet Union as region of the Ukrainian SSR. The accession of the Western Ukraine to the Soviet Union (Reunion of Western Ukraine and USSR) - the adoption of the Soviet Union in Western Ukraine with the adoption of an Extraordinary Session V of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Law "On the inclusion of the Western Ukraine in the Soviet Union to the reunification of the Ukrainian SSR" (November 1, 1939) at the request of the Commission of the Plenipotentiary of the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine. The decision to file motions stipulated in the Declaration "On joining of Western Ukraine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" adopted by the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine in Lviv, October 27, 1939.
On November 14, 1939 Third Extraordinary Session of the Supreme Soviet of USSR decided: "Accept Western Ukraine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and thus reunite the great Ukrainian people in a unified Ukrainian state."
In 1940 part of the local population were arrested by the NKVD, and sent to Gulag system or to various Soviet prisons among which were Polish, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and many others.
In 1941, the town was seized by Nazi Germany.
During the German occupation most of the city's Jews were murdered by the German occupation authorities. Initial street executions of September and October 1941 took the lives of approximately 500 people. The following year the
