In the summer of 1655, Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Swedish military successes weakened the Lithuanians' loyalty to Warsaw.

After Janusz Radziwiłł proposed to the Swedish king Charles X Gustav to accept Lithuania as a citizen, Vasily Likharev went to meet with Hetman Wincenty Gosiewski.

[4] Russian boyar Fyodor Rtishchev was negotiating with Paweł Jan Sapieha at that time, the latter agreed to a halt in hostilities and sent his ambassador to Moscow.

Even before he learned about the results of Rtishchev's mission, voivode Semyon Urusov began his campaign to the west in order to win the race for power in Lithuania from the Swedes.

[5] According to contemporaries, 30,000 people went on a campaign,[6] but modern authors sharply criticize these figures, noting that there were 10,000 in the entire region, of which c. 4,000 went on a march to Brest from Kovno.