Britain and France declared war on Russia

On March 28, 1854, Great Britain and France declared war on Russia, formally entering what became the Crimean War on the side of the Ottoman Empire.

The fighting had actually begun months earlier, in October 1853, between Russia and the Ottomans. Western alarm grew as Russia pressed into the Ottoman-held Danubian Principalities and destroyed a Turkish squadron. When Russia ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to withdraw, London and Paris committed their own armies.

What followed was a grim, badly managed campaign on the Crimean Peninsula, centered on the long siege of Sevastopol.

The war is remembered less for strategy than for its emblematic moments: the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and Florence Nightingale’s sanitary reforms in the military hospitals, which helped found modern nursing. It dragged on until 1856, killing hundreds of thousands, many of them from disease rather than enemy fire.