From 29 July to 6 August 1920, heavy fighting between Poles and Bolsheviks took place near Brody. The task of the Polish soldiers was to surround and eliminate Semyon Budyonny's 1st Horse Army. The fighting was very fierce and bloody, but due to a change of plans by the Polish command, the originally set objective was not achieved. Great valour was displayed by General Karliczka-Krajowski's 18th DP. A total of around 3,000 Polish soldiers were killed in the fighting.

Most of the fallen were buried in the city cemetery, creating the largest military quarters in Ukraine.

In the interwar period, the quarter was divided into two parts, in the middle of which was the grave of an unknown soldier with a Virtuti Militari cross and the inscription: "To the Unknown / 1914-1920 / Soldier". On the concrete grave crosses were metal plaques with the personalities of the buried.

In September 1939, Soviet soldiers tried to destroy the main monument, but because of its massiveness they stopped at devastation. Almost all inscription plaques were torn off the crosses on the soldiers' graves. After the Second World War, the right-hand part of the cemetery was irretrievably destroyed by building over it with new burials.

In 1995 the authorities of the city of Brody gave permission to the Polish Society for the Care of Military Graves in Lviv to clean up the cemetery section. Since then, the cemetery has been gradually cleaned up, with work also carried out by various Polish associations. As part of this work, the slab in honour of the Unknown Soldier has been put back in its original place, the grave crosses are being gradually replaced with new ones (there are about 1,250 of them left), the area is being tidied up, and feral vegetation is being removed. Currently, the soldiers' graves are nameless, only on one cross the original pre-war plaque with the inscription "Here rests Żenko Franciszek soldier of the Polish Army fallen in 1920" has been preserved.

In 2018, the clean-up work on this plot was funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the Minister's 'Sites of National Remembrance Abroad' programme.