News of the withdrawal was a huge shock to the Slavophiles in Moscow and St Petersburg who had seen the Russian advance into the Balkans as a war of liberation for the Slavs. They now became despondent at what they saw as the abandonment of their ideals. Konstantin Aksakov had dreamed of a Slavic federation under Russian leadership. He thought the war would end with the planting of a cross on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. But the retreat from the Danube filled him ‘with feelings of disgust and shame’, as he wrote to his brother Ivan to explain:
