Yurii Khmelnytsky

Yuri Khmelnytsky was born in 1641[1] in Subotiv near Chyhyryn in central Ukraine. In 1659, the Cossack Rada elected the 17-year-old Yurii as their hetman in Bila Tserkva, replacing the deposed Ivan Vyhovsky. The young hetman faced problems: the uneasy alliance with the Tsardom of Russia and the ongoing wars against Poland–Lithuania and against the Crimean Khanate.

During the conflict against Poland–Lithuania, Yuri Khmelntsky's Cossacks were defeated near the town of Korsun, he was captured by the Poles and later pledged loyalty to king Jan II Kazimierz of Poland–Lithuania (reigned 1648-1668).

In 1659, the parliament (sejm walny) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth granted him nobility.[1] On 24 March 1661, he became starost of Hadiach.[1]

Yuri's perceived treason provoked a civil war within Ukraine in 1661, when the new ataman Yakym Somko led the pro-Moscow Cossacks against Yuri and his new Polish allies. At the battle near the town of Pereiaslav in the summer of 1662, Somko's Cossacks and the Russians under Grigory Romodanovsky defeated Yuri Khmelnytsky.

After the defeat, Khmelnytsky entered an alliance with the Crimean Khanate, but this resulted in little beyond massive looting and raiding of Ukrainian towns and villages by the Tatars. Thereupon, Yuri gave up his hetman title and became a monk at the Mharsky Monastery in the autumn of 1662. Between 1664 and 1667, the hetman Pavlo Teteria imprisoned him in Lviv.

After his release in 1672, he participated in a campaign against the Tatars and was captured near Uman and brought to Constantinople, where he was allowed to live in a Greek Orthodox monastery. In 1676 — after the Sultan's ally, Petro Doroshenko, surrendered to the Russians — the Porte decided to use Khmelnytsky's famous name to reinforce their claim to the Right-bank Ukraine starting the Russo-Turkish War (1676–1681).

In 1678, the Turkish army captured Chyhyryn and declared Yuri Khmelnytsky as a new hetman of Ukraine, although in reality he was only a puppet for the Ottoman Sultan. Ottoman Turkish army with Yuri in tow captured and burned down Kaniv and other Ukrainian towns. He then retired to his Sultan dictated capital at Nemyriv in Turkish occupied parts of Ukraine, as a vassal of sultan Mehmed IV until 1681, when the Turks removed him from power due to his unstable mental health and unprecedented cruelty. Two years later, he was briefly re-instated by the Poles. Finally in 1685, the Turks captured Yuri and executed him (strangled[1]) in Kamianets-Podilskyi.