>>14949821In September 1862, after attacking a Circassian village and seeing some of its inhabitants flee into the forest, General Yevdokimov bombarded that forest for six hours straight and ordered his men to kill every living thing, he then set the forest on fire to make sure everyone was killed.
At the negotiations to end the Crimean War, the British representative, the Earl of Clarendon, insisted that the Kuban river should be the boundary between Russia and Turkey, which would place Circassia outside of Russian rule, but he was undermined by the French and Turkish representatives which supported Russian ownership of Circassia. When Clarendon then tried to make the treaty state that Russia could not build forts in Circassia, he was again thwarted by the French representative.
By the fall of 1863, Russian operations had become methodical, following a formula by which, after the Circassians fled into the woods, their village and any food that could be found would be burned, then after a week or two they would search for and destroy any huts the Circassians might have made for shelter, burn the forest, and then this process would be repeated until General Yevdokimov was satisfied that all the natives in the area had died either by being shot by Russians, of starvation, or being burnt.
In 1864 in the valley of Khodz the population resisted Russian troops. During the battle the men were joined by the women, who disposed of their jewellery into the river and took up arms into a fight to the end and to have an honourable death. Russians troops with heavy artillery and other modern weaponry killed all the men, women and children, in a scene that a Circassian chronicler who had witnessed the events described as "a sea of blood".
Ivan Drozdov reported to have overheard Circassian men were taking vows to sacrifice themselves to the cannons to allow their family and rest of the villages to escape, and later more reports of groups of Circassians doing so were received.
