Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Somebody seems to not have been paying attention the last time, so I'll say it again: The war of 1877-78 was a Russian victory. They finished it with their army south of the Balkan Mountains and would have irreparably damaged Turkish power in Europe had the terms of San Stefano not been overturned.
Well, they did irreparably damage Turkish power in Europe, but they also irreparably damaged themselves in the process. The war was a terrible undermining of Russia's financial position, Russia's prestige, especially in the Slavic world (which led to later pan-Slavic blustering with some unfortunate consequences, like WWI), and various other negative effects.
It was definitely a victory, but a Pyrrhic one at best.
The Russians weren't halted at Pleven, they left a force behind to besiege it and sent the rest southward. Neither did they need to take Constantinople, that's setting the bar pretty damn high. And if the Russians were at a breaking point, why didn't the Turks just waited them out and let them break? Why were they willing to sign a Carthaginian peace if their enemy was doing so badly? This was possibly the most successful war the Russians ever thought against the Ottoman Empire, disparaging their performance in it serves only to get people wondering just what the Russian army can accomplish when it gets its shit together.
No, they were halted at Plevna. They had managed to take the Shipka Pass before Osman Pasha moved to Plevna. While that was useful later, in in the short term it accomplished little, since the Ottoman supply route was the rail line from Varna to the Danube.
Plevna lay directly across Russian communications, and it was impossible to move forward with the main army so long as a powerful force was located there.
The Russians were pretty much halted in their beachhead in N. Bulgaria until many more corps could be mobilized and sent to the front. Once the Ottomans at Plevna surrendered, the army was free to move forward, and even then it was opposed for some time by some impressive rear-guard actions - but eventually it was impossible to hold on due to sheer weight of numbers.
It wouldn't have been possible to take Istanbul, but you're right, it wasn't necessary to win the war - but it would have been necessary to take it if they wanted to annex it.
How does going from this to this count as a draw? Even discounting San Stefano, which required an opportunistic intervention from Britain, you still have the Ottoman border being pushed from north of the Danube to the outskirts of Adrianople, the single biggest Ottoman loss in all its wars with Russia. I cannot think of any other war ending as badly for one of the sides involved being called a draw, so what standards are we using?
It was a disaster for the Ottomans, but it was essentially a "draw" as far as Russian aims are concerned. They gained nothing from the war. There was no chance that San Stefano would hold under any circumstances. The Balkans were always a European question and no one power would have been left to dispose of the whole region as it pleased. If Russia had not been totally exhausted it could have told the British and everyone else to go to hell. The fleet was irrelevant - but even a small British land force in alliance with the Ottomans could have rolled up the Russian army.
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