The war grew out of Ottoman ambition. Having overrun the region of Podolia in a war against Poland, the Ottomans set out to extend their rule over all of Right-bank Ukraine, backing a Cossack hetman, Petro Doroshenko, who had become their vassal in 1669. Doroshenko's pro-Turkish course dismayed many Cossacks, and it drew Moscow in. In 1676 Russian and Ukrainian forces under Ivan Samoilovich and Grigory Romodanovsky besieged Chyhyryn and forced Doroshenko to surrender, leaving their own garrison in the fortress. The Ottomans would not accept the loss. To press their claim they produced a symbolic figure from captivity: Yuri Khmelnitsky, son of the great Bohdan, long an Ottoman prisoner, whom the sultan now named hetman of Right-bank Ukraine - a hollow authority resting entirely on Turkish arms.

In July 1677 an Ottoman army of some 45,000 under Ibrahim Pasha advanced on Chyhyryn. The Russian and Ukrainian relief force fought its way across the rivers under artillery cover and fell on the besiegers' camp, and by the end of August Ibrahim broke off and retreated, leaving perhaps twenty thousand of his men dead. The failure cost him his freedom - he was imprisoned on his return to Constantinople - and cost the Crimean khan Selim I Giray his throne. The following summer the Ottomans came back in overwhelming force: the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa with around 70,000 men and up to 50,000 Crimean Tatars. This time the walls could not hold. When the Turks broke into the Lower Town on the 11th of August 1678, Romodanovsky ordered the citadel abandoned and withdrew his army beyond the Dnieper. The campaign killed on the order of seventeen thousand Cossack and Russian troops, and many thousands of Ottomans and Tatars besides.

Wars of this scale were as much a struggle against hunger as against the enemy. An Ottoman field army of 60,000 men and 40,000 horses devoured something like half a million kilograms of food every single day, and the strain of feeding these hosts crippled both treasuries, extracted through fixed prices, taxes, and outright confiscation from the lands they crossed. After the sieges came skirmishing along the frontier until, on the 3rd of January 1681, the Treaty of Bakhchisarai fixed the border between the two empires along the Dnieper. Historians still argue over who won - Ottoman victory, Russian victory, or bloody stalemate. What is not in dispute is the toll on the ground: a fortress reduced, a region depopulated, and tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians who never came home from the fight over Chyhyryn.