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With each passing day, our horror grows at the ever more demagogic and intolerant language used by the Russian Empire. As a nation with a significant non-Slavic, non-Christian population, this inflammatory language does not bode well for the people of Russia, who are proud of their all-encompassing Russian identity despite their many ethnic and religious differences. 

The Ottoman Empire has for centuries - before Russia was even a passing thought in the minds of the people of Novgorod and Muscovy - been the caretaker of all those who would call themselves subjects of the Ottoman Empire. We have cared for our Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects, our Slavic, Greek, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Arab, Persian and other people. All lived together, perhaps not always as peacefully as we would have liked, but our tolerance and acceptance for each other cannot be denied, and God and history are our witnesses. Before Russia existed, the Ottoman Empire cared for its people, and even when Russia began making demands that the Christians of the empire be in its care, it was us who cared for them, and us who shall continue to do so.

Russia’s recent rhetoric in regards to its Muslim subjects has been most worrying, its attempts to glorify the Slavic people and make them somehow different from Muslims – even though being a Muslim and a Slav are not mutually exclusive – does not bode well for the future. By spurring hatred against a non-Christian religious group, you open the way for hatred against all non-Christians, such as Jews and Buddhists and many other sects and faiths existing in Russia. And with the hatred against these people of different religions, there will grow hatred for the ethnic groups who follow these religions, the Tatars, non-Christian Slavs, Manchus, Mongols, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Caucasians, and the list goes on. With time, no doubt, even Christians of other ethnicities will come under the fire of demagogues and hatred will grow even against other Christians.

Thus, in response to these growing dangers for all non-Christians and non-Slavs in Russia, and in response to this clear sign that Russia does not wish to be a nation for all its citizens and peoples, we hereby reject Russian, and any other, authority over Ottoman Christian subjects. As a nation which cannot care for, tolerate and protect its non-Christian, non-Slavic people, and even its Slavic non-Christian people, we do not think it has any moral or religious authority over any Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

Further to this, we cannot sit idly by as our brethren in Russia come under attack, we must rise to protect them. The Ottoman Empire can trace its roots back to the far east, the Turkic people who first united Anatolia so many centuries ago - to give rise to an empire for all its subjects - trace their roots back to the Mongols and the Chinese, and we do not easily forgot the bond of blood we share with our eastern brethren, with the Uzbeks and the Mongols and the Chinese and the Kazakhs and the Tatars, amongst others. Therefore, just as we rise to protect the helpless against Russian oppression, we beseech our brother, the Empire of the Great Qing, to also rise to the responsibility of protecting all eastern peoples under Russian oppression.

We pray to the Almighty that the hatred spewed by the likes of Satan’s Tyrannical Shadow on Earth, Alexander II of Russia, will not lead to permanent damage between the different peoples living under his tyranny, and we assure them that God has not forsaken them, if you show patience and forbearance, then surely He who liberated those before you from oppression will liberate you as well. 

[b]His Highness, Grand Vizier Mehmed Fuad Pasha, Prime Minister of the Ottoman Empire[/b]