of Europe. On the 1674 Council of Officers in Pereyaslav (17 March) Samoylovych was proclaimed the Hetman of all Ukraine. However the title was not in force until Doroshenko would abdicate. In the summer of 1674 Samoylovych, along with the Russian Grigory Romodanovsky launched an expedition against Doroshenko and besieged Chyhyryn. At that time Mykhailo Khanenko surrendered his title of hetman to Samoylovych in exchange for some land estates. The Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa managed to lift the siege and drive the Russian forces beyond the Dnieper. However, already in the fall of 1675 at the Cossack council in Chyhyryn Doroshenko abdicated and pledged his allegiance to Russia, with Ivan Sirko witnessing it. However, the Russian government demanded him to abdicate again, on the territory of Left-bank Ukraine, and it should be witnessed by Samoylovych and Romodanovsky, the request of which Doroshenko refused. In the fall of 1676 Samoylovych crossed the Dnieper with an army of 30,000 men and once again besieged Chyhyryn. After several hours of battle Doroshenko asked his 2,000 Serdiuk garrison to lay down their arms as he had decided to abdicate, which he did on 19 September 1676. Doroshenko was arrested and brought to Moscow where he was kept in honorary exile, never to return to Ukraine. Service for Russia Voivode of Vyatka In 1676 Petro Doroshenko asked new Russian Tsar Feodor III to forgive him and promised his loyalty. In 1679 he was appointed voyevoda (governor-duke) of Vyatka in central Russia, and after a few years was granted an estate of Yaropolcha in Volokolamsk Uyezd. Petro Doroshenko died in 1698 near Volokolamsk. To this day he remains a controversial figure in Ukrainian history. Some consider him a national hero who wanted an independent Ukraine, while to others he was a power-hungry Cossack Hetman who offered Ukraine to a Muslim Sultan in exchange for hereditary overlordship of his native land. Descendants Among his descendants are Natalia Pushkina, Maria Nirod, and Dmytro Doroshenko. Natalia would marry the poet Alexander Pushkin, and have a daughter named also Natalia, who was named the Countess of Merenberg following her marriage to her husband, a Nassau prince. Their descendants subsequently married into, amongst others, the Romanov dynasty and the Westminster and Milford-Haven noble families of Great Britain. Dmytro on the other hand was a prominent Ukrainian political figure during the Russian Revolution and a leading Ukrainian emigre historian during the inter-war