The Russo-Turkish frontier from Cram's 1896 Railway Map of the Turkish Empire. The Black Sea is in the northwest, Persia to the southeast. The area had a large Armenian and Christian population, and was a principal site of the Armenian Genocide and of Russian military successes.
"On the 17th and 20th of January [1916], Russian destroyers swept the coast of Lazistan destroying a large number of mostly small sailing craft assumed to be used by the Turks to supply their army. The weak naval force at Batum was strengthened by two torpedo boats and the gunboats Donetz and Kubanetz, the former salved after having been sunk at Odessa in the Turkish attack that began the war. They were joined by the old battleship Rotislav, escorted by two torpedo boats, for the attack on the strong Turkish position west of the Archave River that began on 5 February. The Rotislav and Kubanetz pounded the Turkish positions for three and a half hours and returned the following day to continue the barrage, which forced the Turks to abandon their position. The Turks fell back to new positions at Vice, which the Russians reached on the 8th."
The Turkish Sanjak of Lazistan was on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea; its eastern edge bordered Russia. The Russian fleet was working its way westward along the coast. Turkey had entered the war on October 29, 1914, shelling Russian Black Sea ports and sinking Russian ships.
A Naval History of World War I by Paul G. Halpern, page 239, copyright © 1994 by the United States Naval Institute, publisher: UCL Press, publication date: 1994
1916-02-08, 1916, February, Black Sea, naval, Batum, Batumi, Lazistan
