Hetman Doroshenko's acceptance of Ottoman political and military support threatened the Polish-Muscovite armistice as well as Muscovite control over the left bank. This gave Doroshenko the freedom to campaign against either Muscovy or the Commonwealth while holding out to each the possibility that the right concessions might give him reason to break with the Turks and reconcile.
Ordin-Nashchokin, by this time in declining health, had limited options in dealing with the Doroshenko problem. The missions he sent to Istanbul and Edirne to get the sultan to accept Andrusovo were rebuffed, and his efforts to negotiate with the sultan through Crimean Tatar mediation were blocked by the Zaporozhian host, which went so far as to assassinate the Crimean and Muscovite envoys. This left him no real alternative but to concentrate on diplomacy with Warsaw, communicating his willingness to negotiate some kind of shared Polish-Muscovite suzerainty over the right bank in order to transform the Andrusovo Armistice into a permanent peace and a mutual defence pact against the Ottomans. He also sent missions to Vienna, to enlist at the least the emperor's mediation and optimally his agreement to join in coalition against the sultan.
But besides risking giving Doroshenko, the khan, and the sultan provocation to declare war, these negotiations caused alarm among the left-bank cossacks, who feared Ordin-Nashchokin might give back Kiev or even part of the left bank to the Poles in order to achieve his alliance project. Many of those left-bank cossacks losing faith in Muscovy's readiness to stand firm for a unified Ukraine freed from Polish rule began defecting to Doroshenko, who appeared at the time a more resolute defender of these principles even with his troublingties to the Turks and Tatars. Support for Doroshenko on the left bank reached such proportions that eventually even Briukhovet'skyi recognised the extent of his delegitimation, turned renegade, and began expelling the Muscovite garrisons. Briukhovets'kyi apparently expected that Doroshenko and the sultan would reward him by confirming him as vassal hetman over the left bank and Zaporozhia. But Briukhovets'kyi was deceived: Doroshenko crossed the Dnieper and overthrew him, replacing him with commissioned hetman Demian Mnogogreshnyi.
Ordin-Nashchokin retired in 1671. Within a year the new director of the Ambassadors' Chancellery, Artamon Matveev, confronted a simpler if starker and more dangerous situation in Ukraine. Muscovite control over the left bank had been partly restored: Mnogogreshnyi had shifted his allegiance to Moscow and had ratified the Hlukhiv Articles (February 1669). The Hlukhiv Articles had the effect of quelling anti-Muscovite feeling while putting the left- bank hetman on a tighter leash: they conceded some greater autonomy to the hetman's administration (revenues to maintain the Muscovite garrisons and voevody were once again to be collected into the hetman's treasury, not into the tsar's) yet reaffirmed the tsar's right to maintain garrisons for the time being in other towns besides Kiev and to control the Hetmanate's foreign relations.[71]When Mnogogreshnyi began chafing under these restraints Moscow easily deposed him (June 1672) and replaced him with the more compliant Ivan Samoilovich.
Furthermore, support for Doroshenko was now ebbing on the right bank as well as on the left. He was perceived as having gone too far in servilising himself to the sultan, his Korsun' Articles (April 1669) having pledged his full alliance with the Porte and khanate and even his formal vassalage to the sultan. The terms of these Korsun' Articles were meant to commit Ottoman and Crimean Tatar forces to joint operations with Doroshenko's regiments without compromising the autonomy ofUkraine, but the sultan and the khan did not send quick and unequivocal assurance they accepted these terms. The right-bank colonels therefore began falling away from Doroshenko, leaving him all the more dependent upon his Ottoman and Tatar auxiliaries and all the more isolated from the Ukrainian population.
The most important development of all, however, was the escalation of Ottoman military support for Doroshenko into a full-blown Ottoman invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the summer of i672.On 17 October King Michal signed a peace treaty at Buczacz ceding all of Podol'ia to the sultan and recognising the independence of right-bank Ukraine under Hetman Doroshenko.
Podol'ia thereby came under an Ottoman occupation that would last until 1699. And Doroshenko was emboldened to step up agitation on the left bank to unite all Ukraine under his leadership. Muscovite commitment to a protectorate over a left-bank hetmanate now carried much greater risk of provoking war with the Ottoman Empire, the most imposing military power in Eastern Europe.
Yet Artamon Matveev accepted this risk and reaffirmed Moscow's commitment to Samoilovich's left-bank hetmanate. Ironically, Doroshenko's own intransigence had made this possible. Doroshenko was still talking to Muscovite envoys and presenting himself as amenable to reconciliation with Moscow, but he had raised the price for this reconciliation: not only the cession of Kiev, the left bank and Zaporozhia, but also now Moscow's pledge it would assist him militarily to protect Ukraine from the Turks.[72] Thus Muscovy now ran the risk ofwar with the sultan regardless ofwhether it accepted or rejected Doroshenko's sovereignty over all Ukraine. War against the Ottomans was a frightening prospect, but Muscovy was at least better prepared for it now. The Muscovite army had had time to recover from the revenue and manpower shortfalls that had produced stalemate in the Thirteen Years War (by 1669 the total strength of the Belgorod and Sevsk army groups had expanded to over ii2,000);[73] G. G. Romodanovskii had emerged as a competent commander capable of carrying the war over to the right bank; Moscow knew it could count on the loyalty of the Zaporozhian host; great numbers of refugees were crossing the Dnieper to resettle on the left bank; and Samoilovich was as intent on conquering the right bank as Doroshenko was on subjugating the left. The Turks were at the time too preoccupied in Podol'ia to offer Doroshenko much help in holding the eastern reaches of the right bank. Furthermore, Matveev could still hope for alliance with the Commonwealth: the Sejm had refused to ratify the shameful Buczacz Treaty and a number of Polish commanders had joined Crown Hetman Sobieski in a confederatio to resume military operations against the Turks. The wretched King Michal died on 10 November 1673; that same day Sobieski dealt the main Ottoman army a crushing blow at Chocim and forced it to withdraw across the Danube.
In early 1674 Moscow therefore abandoned negotiations with Doroshenko. Romodanovskii and Samoilovich invaded the right bank, captured Cherkassk and a number of other towns, and put Doroshenko's capital of Chyhyryn under siege. An assembly (rada) at Pereiaslav proclaimed Samoilovich hetman of all Ukraine - prematurely, it turned out, for Chyhyryn was well fortified and able to withstand long siege and a large Ottoman army under Kaplan Pasha finally began marching to Doroshenko's relief in the summer. Romodanovskii and Samoilovich were forced to lift the siege and withdraw across the Dnieper. The real damage to Doroshenko's cause was done by his own ally, Kaplan Pasha, whose massacres of civilians at Lodyzhin and Uman' drove thousands of refugees eastward across the Dnieper, and by Hetman Sobieski, recently elected king of Poland, who re-entered right-bank Ukraine and captured a number of important towns as soon as Kaplan Pasha's army had withdrawn.
71
V Gorobets, 'Ukrainsko-rossiiskie otnosheniia v politiko-pravovoi status getman- shchiny', in A. I. Miller et al. (eds.),