Chen Ming made an impromptu idea, but the speed of the formation of the European exchange delegation was quite fast, even if the delegation involved education, economics, philosophy, literature, law, music and other categories, most of the selected members were well-known characters.

But this matter has not been popular among the Chinese people.

China's international status is not the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China in the original time and space, or after the reform. A foreign exchange delegation cannot attract the attention of the common people in the slightest.

The people's attention is more focused on the Jieyang King's 'Journey to the West', while the officialdom's attention is paid to the slight collision between the Li Group and the Liu Group, and the gold mines in Xiangzhou are a little shocking. Now the Bureau of Mines and the Cabinet have openly solicited foreign investment.

There was a slight collision between Lee and Liu in this regard.

Another is concerned about the upcoming trilateral talks between China, Austria and Russia, you know, there is gossip that Emperor Chen will become the son-in-law of Abdul Hamid I next year.

The Ottoman Sultan had a sixteen-year-old princess, and the purpose of Selim's trip was to finalize the marriage between the two sides.

The Ottoman courtiers of Istanbul did not even look at the sons of Chen Ming, who was only in his early forties, when he was in the prime of life, and the whole world would be the hunting ground of the Chinese emperor for the next twenty years.

Therefore, the Ottoman monarch was only thinking about Chen Ming, not the sons who were about the same age as his daughter.

And as for the happiness of the youngest daughter of Abdul Hamid I in the second half of her life, in the interests of the empire, it is not worth mentioning.

Maybe at this time, the princess of Heaven is preparing a dowry.

Although the Ottomans were unaware of Chen Han's recent foreign policy adjustments, they did not hide their overtures to Chen Han, and they also supported Chen Han's plan to find a foothold in North Africa. Invisibly, Chen Han has already been catered to!

Now Chen Han's development in the heavenly world is very favorable, there is already a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula, and now there is a foothold on the southern shore of the Gulf of Aden, maybe in Chen Ming's lifetime, the gold mines in South Africa can be dug into Chen Han's treasury.

The Ottoman Empire's agreement with Russia was also difficult to reach.

The Russians recognized Georgia as an Ottoman sphere of influence, but they were adamant not to completely withdraw from the Crimean peninsula. After repeated negotiations, an armistice agreement was reached between the two sides, in which Russia and Austria would be treated equally in Crimea.

An armistice agreement between China and Russia is also easy to reach, with the current Line of Actual Control of the two armies as the criterion, each retreating 100 miles, and this 100-kilometer distance is the demilitarized armed zone between the two sides. Only a small number of border guards are allowed to patrol and wander!

And as the price of being swallowed up by China, China wants to release Russian civilians and prisoners of war in its hands in the next five years, and St. Petersburg will not have war reparations for Nanjing.

But in response to the Western Sea on the western coastline of the Caspian Sea, Russia insisted on China's withdrawal.

……

The first few months of the eighteenth year of Chengtian were a mixed year for the Russians.

On the Western Front, Russia and Sweden have reached a complete cease-fire agreement, and Russia has not yet paid much price. Gustav III's personal aspirations were too strong.

To the delight of the Russians, Gustav III was assassinated by a Swedish nobleman at a masquerade ball less than two months after he signed a formal armistice with Russia.

The news was shocking.

Historically, Gustav III died of an infection from a wound, and the Assassin's shot in the back did not actually kill him. But at this time, although the masquerade that left the blood of the king was opened three months later than in the original plane, Gustav III died cleanly. He was shot in the head and died instantly, not from a gunshot wound and eventually died.

Russia has removed a formidable enemy.

Gustav III was a powerful and politically savvy man, and if he had been able to sit on the throne of the Swedish king, Sweden would probably have become a headache for Russia.

At the same time, in the main battlefield in the south, the Russians finally took Ochakov with the cooperation of the Austrians.

In just two months, the Russian and Austrian navies fought three fierce battles in the Ochakov waters, and the Turkish army lost a total of 32 ships of various types, while the rest of the ships either fled to the western shore of the Black Sea or took refuge in Ochakov. In order to save the defeat, the Ottoman command sent reinforcements. The two fleets of Russia and Russia encountered each other at sea, and in May the two fleets engaged in the Battle of Fidonisi. Admiral Ushakov of the Russian army led his ships to attack at full speed and seize the upper hand, so that the Ottoman fleet that had made a comeback was caught in the middle of the Russian fleet. The Russian army destroyed 7 Ottoman warships in this battle, and the remaining Turkish ships were all withdrawn to the western coast of the Black Sea.

At this point, there was no chance that the Ochakov fortress would be spared.

The Russian-Austrian [Austrian] coalition forces took a month of high-intensity harassment of Ochakov, and then in a dark night with strong winds and howling, the troops attacked Ochakov in six directions, and after several hours of fighting, the coalition forces captured Ochakov, killing and capturing 11,500 Turkish soldiers and 110 artillery pieces.

Not long after, the Third Battle of the Lemnik River began, and the two sides fought fiercely for 12 hours. The Ottoman army suffered heavy losses, abandoned its position and fled, with more than 10,000 casualties and drowning. The battle of Remnik disrupted the Ottoman position. After this battle, the Russian army captured the fortress of Bingela and captured Akerman without a fight, taking control of the whole of Moldova.

The Russian army seems to have finally won the harvest season, and the results of the war against the Ottomans in this six months are higher than the sum of the last three years.

It's a pity that not long after, a basin of ice water was quickly poured on the heads of the Russian army.

The new offensive they launched against the West Sea not only failed to take the non-fortress city of the West Sea, let's call it a city, but the Russian army that entered the battle suffered a great setback, with losses of more than 5,000 men.

Since the Russian army has repeatedly attacked the West China Sea before, the mobilized troops have become more and more elite and capable of fighting.

Then they took advantage of the heavy fog after the autumn of the West Sea, divided their troops and launched a fierce attack on the West Sea. But it still didn't take it.

Seriously, the Russians spent their main efforts on the southern front in this war, although the Ottomans did not eat dry food, but the Russians had the cooperation of the Austrians.

Now that the war has been fought year after year, the Ottomans will not be able to hold on, and in this year's time, although the Russians and Austrians have made a lot of efforts, they have finally achieved a lot of results. It can be said that the Ottomans were completely crushed on the battlefield.

But in comparison, the results they achieved against the Ottomans could even be said to be brilliant, but in the war in the Western Sea, it was as rotten as a piece of.

The war situation in the West Sea has always been that Russia is strong and China is weak, and the latter's fortifications are also mainly civil engineering, and there are few iron-reinforced concrete buildings and permanent fortifications on the surface.

The Russian nobles up and down St. Petersburg couldn't figure out why a small non-fortress city with only about 10,000 people stationed (the Russian army exaggerated the fact a little) was still standing still under the siege of 30,000 or 40,000 horses, and even they still had the spare strength to attack everywhere, harassing the towns and villages of the Russian army along the northern coast of the western front of the Caspian Sea in warships, which greatly shook Russia's prestige in the local area.

Especially more than a month before the attack launched by the Russian army, Pan Chang personally led 600 people and rode twelve warships, which are all the surface forces of the current Wehrmacht in the Caspian Sea, and the second batch of warships launched in the east not long ago.

Landing from the north of Astrakhan, the Russians were not at all defenseless, and in one day Pan Changlian conquered four small towns, killing no less than 300 young Russians, many of whom were militiamen, and the rest were mostly people who helped the militia fight. also broke up the small garrison and 100 policemen in one of the small towns, and it was also thanks to their timely discovery that they ran away early, otherwise they would have to be eaten all.

Forty or fifty young and beautiful - relative - Russian women were robbed, and all the houses were set on fire. They killed all the animals they could not take away, and when they ate and drank, they threw them into rivers, wells, or fires.

And this is not the first time that the West Sea Defense Forces have made such a sortie.

The local garrison of the Russians was either small in number, or could not catch up with the fleet, and watched the Wehrmacht float away again and again, and there was no way to do it, so that the Russians hated the Wehrmacht in the West Sea.

Faced with the dilemma of the western coastline of the Caspian Sea, how much do the Russians want their Caspian fleet to become strong overnight? But this is not possible.

Whether it is the craftsmen and materials of the shipbuilding, or the most important thing is wood, it takes a long time to prepare.

Therefore, the Russian army urgently needs to take out the West Sea.

Even the commander-in-chief of the Russian army in the Caucasus had to adjust the operational focus. A group of Cossack cavalry was transferred east to the Caspian Sea for defense. In addition, a large army was organized to besiege and consume the reserves of the West Sea, and at the same time, the shipyard in Astarakhan, which had been burned by the Chinese, was also picked up, and Catherine II of St. Petersburg felt the wisdom of Peter the Great, and this sea area really needed an orthodox naval fleet.

St. Petersburg should not ignore the Caspian flotilla as a place for degrading officers and allotments. It's very important.

It's just that the strength of the Russian army is really tight.

Before Gustav III was done, St. Petersburg was nervously about borrowing troops from Vienna. Originally, Russia and Sweden had signed an armistice, and the Western Front could not be completely unprepared. But now that Gustav III is dead, then everything is ok!

It's just that it was transferred from the battlefield on the Western Front to the east, across the entire northern tip of the European continent, and there are no 10,000 miles, but there are always thousands of miles. And the troops also need to be adjusted. So the troops that came out of the 'rich' Russian army have not yet arrived.

The Russian army could only dig the east wall to make up the west wall, and put together a Cossack cavalry to rush to the Caspian Sea. The other is to order the weak villages and forts along the coast to move inland. At the same time, the policy of merging small villages was implemented, and the scattered Russians were concentrated, and a part of them was armed as a militia to strengthen the defense forces along the Caspian Sea. At the same time, the Cossack cavalry also stationed mobile forces at various points, and in the event of an incident, they immediately assembled a large force of horses to come to the rescue, hoping to curb the incessant harassment of the Wehrmacht in the coastal areas.

The Russian army is seizing the time to mobilize troops and adjust its deployment to cope with this most tense period. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, was in a rare truce. Pan Chang was waiting for the launch of the third wave of warships on the east coast.

In the previous many sorties, the losses of the Wehrmacht were very small, and the total number of combat losses was only 200, but the results were very brilliant, burning more than a dozen or twenty Russian towns and towns, as well as large areas of farmland, seizing more than 5,000 stones of grain [including potatoes], and shipping back more than 400 livestock and more than 200 horses to the west.

They plundered more than 500 Russian women, killed and wounded more than 2,000 young Russians, and killed tens of thousands of Russian livestock.

Not only that, but they also met the Russian Caspian Fleet four times in the Caspian Sea and sank a total of five warships of the Russian Caspian Flotilla. On the other hand, their own ships were lightly damaged twice.

Generally speaking, Pan Chang's fight on the western coastline of the Caspian Sea has been impressive, effectively dealing a blow to the rising arrogance of the Russian army, and greatly shaking its prestige on the western coast of the Caspian Sea and the eastern tip of the Caucasus.

In the harassment war in the last meeting, the Wehrmacht directly crossed Astarahan under the leadership of Pan Chang, which can be said to be a heavy psychological blow to the Russian army. They were stunned to find that the battlefield on the west coast was not limited to the two cities of Astrakhan and the West Sea, but depended on the entire coastline controlled by the Russian army.

This small-scale sneak attack by the Wehrmacht is a kind of feeling when the Russians first entered the northern part of the Caspian Sea and were harassed by nomads. It's just that the nomads of that era, the Kazakhs and Tatars, were not able to conquer the Russians' towns at all, and they could only face harassment from the villages.

And now the Wehrmacht is advanced in weapons, not to mention small towns, even large towns, as long as they give them time, they can also turn them into a scorched earth.

This realization made the Russians extremely troubled and hated the West Sea.

More than one Russian magnate swore to God that after the war, the Caspian flotilla would be well built and put in order. But none of this had any effect at all.

It is impossible for God to transfer the elite warships of the Russian army in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea with a 'miracle', and it is impossible to stop all the actions of the Chinese in an instant and give the Russians ten years to make their Caspian fleet strong.

Although these words are full of frustration, they are useless. What is even more terrifying is that when the war is over, it is likely that a large number of the elite in St. Petersburg will once again forget this phrase.

As long as the Russians cannot gain the upper hand in a naval war, this asymmetrical war of the Chinese can continue forever. Because they come and go freely on the surface of the sea, they can often attack the weak with a strong blow. The Russian army has limited troops, weak defenses, and is completely unclear about the enemy's next attack, which makes them always in a passive state. And the Wehrmacht firmly grasped the initiative on the battlefield, making the Russian army exhausted, but still lost everywhere. It is foreseeable that if the Russian army fails to come up with good countermeasures, there will be trouble in this sea circle.

The Russians cannot tolerate this passivity, which makes them lose face too much.

The previous Russia had a strong and psychological advantage over Baku Khan and the Persian Kingdom. But now, they can't hold their heads up.

The Kingdom of Persia and Baku Khan have greatly helped the Chinese on the issue of the 'Western Sea', and if the Russian army wants to retaliate against it, the Chinese will certainly not agree. The Russians found that if they did not destroy the place of shame in the 'Western Sea', their prestige, their psychological superiority over Baku Khan and the Kingdom of Persia, would be quickly eroded like a bathtub with a drain valve open.