Treaty of Bucharest

On May 28, 1812, the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Bucharest with the Russian Empire, ending the Russo-Turkish War that had begun in 1806. The conflict had been one of the recurring struggles between the two powers over the Balkans and the Danubian principalities, and it had become entangled with the wider upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe.

Russia was eager to conclude the war quickly because of the looming threat of Napoleon's invasion, which indeed began only weeks later in June 1812. The need to free its southern army to face the French gave the Ottomans somewhat better terms than Russia's military position might otherwise have dictated. The negotiations were conducted at Bucharest.

Under the treaty, Russia gained the province of Bessarabia, the territory between the Dnieper and Prut rivers, while restoring other occupied lands such as the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia to Ottoman suzerainty. The acquisition extended Russia's frontier to the Prut and shaped the contested borderlands of the region for the rest of the nineteenth century.