In 1780, after disbanding the Zaporozhian Cossack Host, General Grigorii Potemkin attempted to gather and reorganize the Cossacks on a voluntary basis, and they helped to defend Ukraine from the Turks during the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792). He was able to gather almost 12,000 Cossacks and called them the Black Sea Cossacks. After the conflict was over, rather than allowing the Cossacks to settle across Southern Ukraine, the Russian government began to resettle them on the Kuban River. In 1860, they changed their name to the Kuban Cossacks.
