The final rupture seems to have arisen on the question of the declaration of "the armed neutrality of the North;" but we know that Potemkin and the English ambassador, James Harris (afterwards 1st earl of Malmesbury), were both working against him some time before that.
But the army was ill-equipped and unprepared; and Potemkin in an hysterical fit of depression gave everything up for lost, and would have resigned but for the steady encouragement of the empress.
Very various are the estimates of Potemkin.
Five years later Potemkin induced the chiefs of the Crimea and Kuban to hold a meeting at which the annexation of their country to Russia was declared, Turkey giving her consent by a convention, signed at Constantinople, on the 8th of January 1784, by which the stipulations as to the liberty of the Tatars contained in the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji and the convention of Ainali Ka y ak were abrogated.
After a long siege Ochakov fell to Potemkin, and all its inhabitants were massacred.