Battle of Poltava
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For the swedish: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2133402806
Battle of Poltava
8 July 1709
Poltava, Cossack Hetmanate, Russia (present-day Ukraine)
Swedish Empire
Cossack Hetmanate
VS
Tsardom of Russia
Kalmyk Khanate
Cossack Hetmanate
Sweden:
- Charles XII of Sweden
- Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld
- Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt
- Ivan Mazepa(Cossack)
Russia:
- Peter I
- Boris Sheremetev
- Alexander Menshikov
- Jacob Bruce
- Ivan Skoropadsky(Cossack)
Wiki:
The Battle of Poltava was the decisive victory of tsar Peter the Great (Peter I of Russia) against an army of the Swedish Empire under Swedish king Charles XII. It was the largest and most decisive battle in the Great Northern War (1700–1721).
During the course of six years in the initial stages of the war, king Charles XII and the Swedish Empire had defeated almost all participants in the anti-Swedish coalition, which initially consisted of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Denmark-Norway and the Tsardom of Russia. The latter under Tsar Peter I’s rule was the only one still undefeated. Charles XII therefore chose to invade Russia in the autumn of 1707 and march towards Moscow with a large Swedish army. However, the campaign was complicated by harsh weather conditions and by the Russians applying scorched earth tactics and surprise attacks, which forced Charles XII to interrupt his march on Moscow and instead march south to establish winter quarters in Little Russia (modern day Ukraine) with the help of Ivan Mazepa, hetman of the Zaporizhian Host.
Until the spring of 1709, Charles XII began a very costly siege of the fortified city of Poltava on the western side of the river Vorskla. To rescue Poltava, Peter I crossed the river in mid-June with a large Russian army to the Swedish side of Vorskla. On June 17, Charles XII fell ill as a result of a gunshot wound to the foot, and handed over command of the Carolean army to Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld. Despite his injury, Charles XII did not want to miss an opportunity to take up the fight with the tsar and ordered the army to attack the tsar’s camp on July 8. Due to poor reconnaissance and disorder in the command during the attack, about a third of the Swedish attack force was lost before the decisive battle against the Russian army, where the Swedes were annihilated. Charles XII withdrew with the rest of his army south to the river Dnieper, which both the king, Mazepa and a couple of thousand Swedes and Cossacks crossed, thus managed to escape the Russians and establish themselves in the Ottoman Empire. The rest of the Carolean army was forced to surrender to the Russians at the village of Perevolochna on July 11, 1709.
The Battle of Poltava, as well as the subsequent capitulation, ended in a decisive victory for Russia and became the greatest military catastrophe in Swedish history. It marked a turning point in the continuation of the war in favour of the anti-Swedish coalition, which as a result of the battle was revived and with renewed vigor attacked the weakened Swedish Empire on several fronts. The battle thus symbolized the beginning of Sweden’s final defeat in the war and the end of Sweden’s time as the new dominant power in Northern Europe, a position which after the war was taken over by the Russian Empire. The battle is therefore of crucial importance in the history of Sweden as well as Russia and Ukraine.
