The white smoke on the head of the city of Kyiv was gradually blown away by the breeze, layers of corpses and broken guns, abandoned swords could be seen everywhere, the ladder to the city that was still burning was pushed away one by one by the Ukrainian Cossacks at the head of the city of Kyiv, and not far from the city wall was the Polish army that had just been defeated and retreated like a tide!

Colonel Bogon, who was standing on the tower high in the city wall, put down the monocular in his hand, looked up at the sky, and said to himself with a non-hesitant expression: "After another day, I really don't know how long it will take the Poles to retreat, damn, the Polish-Lithuanian Sulm Assembly is full of a bunch of treacherous villains!" ”

It has been a week since the arrival of the Polish army outside Kiev, and tens of thousands of the main Polish forces gathered under the city of Kiev have been launching onslaught since the third day, and the Poles have used ancient equipment such as siege artillery, siege engines, siege towers, ladders and even torsion trebuchets!

Under the continuous siege and attack of the Polish army, the Ukrainian Cossack rebels, who had been prepared to stay in Kyiv and had enough soldiers, gradually felt struggling, and the gap between the strength of the two sides was too big after all.

Colonel Bogun was originally a Cossack commander of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania in the Ukrainian region, out of ambition and the oppression of the Polish nobles, after the success of the Khmelnytsky uprising, Colonel Bogun did not hesitate to take his Cossack soldiers to join the rebel army, and helped the Khmelnytsky leader to win several battles, all the way to the city of Kiev, witnessed the victory to take the city of Kiev, the leader of Khmelnytsky, who was the main force of Poland in Ukraine, and signed an armistice agreement with the Polish envoy majestically.

At the moment of the signing of the armistice, Colonel Bogun thought that the Ukrainian nation could gain real independence and that the Cossack warriors could establish a politically self-sufficient Cossack hetate, but unfortunately, less than a year later, the war resumed, and the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, which had been prepared for a long time, came up and overwhelmed Khmelnitsky and his followers!

Colonel Bogon, walking through the streets of Kyiv, saw either the wounded who were screaming miserably, or the conscripts whose tired expressions revealed a little fear and paralysis.

Even though Khmelnitsky tried his best to recruit Cossack fighters who were willing to establish a Cossack hetmanate during the uprising, due to the low Cossack population base, the number of Cossack fighters following Khmelnitsky was never more than 10,000, and Khmelnytsky not only needed to garrison Kiev, but also many towns in Ukraine also needed a small number of Cossack warriors to maintain his rule.

Therefore, the number of defenders in the city of Kyiv is nearly 20,000, but most of them are conscripted citizens in the city of Kyiv and the Ukrainian militia who follow Khmelnytsky, and the real Cossack fighters are only more than 6,000 people, and more than 1,000 people became seriously wounded or a corpse in the multi-day siege of the city!

The Polish army was large in number and under great logistical pressure, so it was natural that they attacked desperately, causing great losses to the Cossack rebels in Kiev.

It didn't take long for Colonel Bogun to arrive in the hall of the castle in the center of Kiev, where the Khmelnytsky chief was pointing at the battle sketch with a group of Zaporosh Cossack henchmen.

The most radical of the Cossack groups lived mainly in the rapids of the middle reaches of the Dnieper, Zaporosh means 'rapids', and Zaporosh was the most militarily independent of the Cossack groups, and they lived by fishing and hunting instead of farming.

But Zaporosh's most important source of income is being a mercenary and a marauder!

The Zaporosh Cossacks were organized in the form of a military-civilian tribal self-government, and they built a special kind of camp called "Sechi" (or translated as "camp"), consisting of earthen enclosures, moats, log walls, and towers with shooting holes, and the camp held regular general meetings of its members, and the settlement was indistinguishable from a small military fortress.

The Zaporoš Cossacks, who regarded mercenaries and bandits as their main income, were much more combative and unruly than the other farming Cossacks, and Khmelnitsky came from the Zaporoš Cossacks, who were originally a small Cossack mercenary officer hired by the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.

Colonel Bogun, of course, also came from the Zaporosh Cossacks, in fact, in Khmelnitsky's ranks, all the middle and senior officers were Zaporosh Cossacks, they were brave and good at fighting, and they fought by unscrupulous means, and they were extremely lethal!

As the leader, Khmelnitsky was even more ambitious, he was very good at winning people's hearts, extremely cruel to the enemy, but very affectionate to his own people, which is why many warriors of the Zaporosh Cossacks were willing to follow Khmelnitsky in the uprising.

"Bogon, what about the casualties?" When Khmelnitsky saw Colonel Bogun come in, he enthusiastically pulled him in and asked.

"Chief, we have more than 200 dead, and more than 300 are seriously wounded and unable to continue fighting, a third of them are the old brothers we brought over, if we continue like this, we will be consumed alive by the Poles, we must break through or call for help!"

After hearing this, the smile on Khmelnitsky's face quickly disappeared, and he sighed after pondering for a moment and replied: "The Poles have scattered a large number of light cavalry in our territory, and the brothers in other places are not even able to support us, it is difficult to even protect themselves, the city of Kyiv cannot be lost, the brothers outside only insisted on seeing that the city of Kyiv was still in our hands, if the city of Kyiv is lost, our uprising will inevitably suffer a heavy blow!"

When the time comes, the Poles will not let us all go! ”

As he spoke, Khmelnitsky glanced at the Zaporosh Cossack officers around him with a cautious expression.

"However, if the fighting intensity continues today, it will not take more than a month, and we will not have many Cossack soldiers to fight in the city, and you know the leaders of the fighting power of those militias, if it were not for our old brothers to take the lead in supporting them, they would have collapsed in the second attack of the Poles!"

Colonel Bogon slammed his fist on the combat sketch and replied indignantly.

Khmelnitsky frowned and paced back and forth for a few minutes, then his eyes flashed, and he said solemnly to everyone: "I remember, recently the Poles in the Zhytomyr region have encountered a big problem, a few days ago our scouts received information from a group of refugees, Zhytomyr City was taken by a group of rogues who called themselves the Taiping Army, the leader is called Hong Tiancheng, it seems to be a yellow-skinned, black-haired, black-eyed Mongolian Tatar descendant, we may be able to find a breakthrough in him!" ”