During 1918 the region also saw the establishment of the Central Caspian Dictatorship, the Republic of Mountainous Armenia and an Allied intervention force, nicknamed Dunsterforce, composed of troops drawn from the Mesopotamian and Western Fronts.

In March 1915, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov stated in a meeting with British ambassador George Buchanan and French Ambassador Maurice Paléologue that a lasting postwar settlement demanded full Russian possession of Constantinople (the capital city of the Ottoman Empire), the straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, southern Thrace up to the Enos-Midia line as well as parts of the Black Sea coast of Anatolia between the Bosphorus, the Sakarya River and an undetermined point near the Bay of Izmit.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was in the proposed path of Ottoman ambitions, and owned the exclusive rights to work petroleum deposits throughout the Persian Empire except in the provinces of Azerbaijan, Ghilan, Mazendaran, Asdrabad and Khorasan.

At the beginning of 1916, the Turks sent huge reinforcements to the Caucasus consisting of troops who had previously won the Gallipoli campaign, their total number was 445 battalions, 159 squadrons, as well as about 12,000 Kurds[6] Many were poorly equipped.

At the onset of the Caucasus campaign, the Russians had to redeploy almost half of their forces to the Prussian front due to the defeats at the Battle of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, leaving behind just 60,000 troops.

[27] Lionel Dunsterville was appointed in 1917 to lead an Allied force of under 1,000 Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand troops, accompanied by armored cars.

Japan provided support to Russia on the Caucasus Front, although direct participation of Japanese troops in combat operations was limited.

Let the Armenian people of Turkey who have suffered for the faith of Christ receive resurrection for a new free life...[39] On December 15, 1914, at the Battle of Ardahan, the city was captured by the Turks.

On May 27, during the Russian offensive, the interior minister of Talat Pasha ordered a forced deportation of all Armenians out of region with the Tehcir Law to the Syria and Mosul.

While diversionary attacks held the attention of Mahmut Kamil near the Deve-Boyun ridge, Russian forces broke through at Forts Kara-gobek and Tafet.

After fighting from 1–9 August 1916, the Ottoman Army was overwhelmed and the entire region fell to the Russian Empire and Armenian volunteers, and thus an assault on Van was prevented.

Starting from the spring of 1917, the situation was completely disadvantageous as a renewed typhus, scurvy and similar problems resulting from hygiene and food, became very common in the Caucasian army.

On March 9, 1917, a Special Transcaucasian Committee was established with Member of the State Duma V. A. Kharlamov as the Chairman to replace the Imperial Viceroy Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia (1856–1929) by the Russian Provisional Government as the highest organ of civil administrative body in Transcaucasia.

During the summer, during the occupation of Turkish Armenia the Russians sponsored a conference to consider emergency measures and adopted plans to form a 20,000 man militia under Andranik to be ready in December 1917.

Andranik's division's composition was this: On September 14, 1917, the Russian army in the region, which was about to completely disintegrate, lost commanding authority, and the tendency of the villagers for plundering had increased.

Towards the end of autumn, the Chief General of the Caucasus Front Przhevalskii had already ordered the establishment of national Armenian and Georgian forces within the Army to slow down the disintegration.

The Russian forces were in a line from the west of Trabzon, along the Erzincan-Kemah passage, passing through south of Tunceli and Murat waters to Lake Van and to Baskale.

At the turn of 1918, the Allied Powers, the Cossacks in the south, the Georgians, the Pontic Greeks, and the Armenians were willing to build a resistance line against the Ottomans through gathering in the region.

[52] The Bolshevik revolution left Russia's vast southern territories unguarded, except for a few thousand Armenian volunteers equipped with castoff Russian arms, commanded by Tovmas Nazarbekian and an even smaller force of refugees from western Anatolia led by Andranik Ozanian, spread along a line extending from Yerevan to Van and Erzinjan.

Enver Pasha offered to surrender all claims in the Caucasus in return for recognition of the Ottoman re-acquisition of the east Anatolian provinces as agreed to at Brest-Litovsk.

[59] On April 23, 1918, the Ottomans laid siege to the fortress city of Kars, now under the effective control of Armenian and non-Bolshevik Russian troops.

General Nazarbekov, the Armenian Corps Commander based in Yerevan acting through a French intermediary, agreed to the surrender of the city and its garrison on April 25, 1918.

[63] Early in June, the Ottoman army under Vehip Pasha renewed its offensive on the main road to Tiflis, where they confronted a joint German-Georgian force.

The Ottoman government had to concede to German pressure and to halt, for the moment, a further advance into Georgia, reorienting its strategic direction towards Azerbaijan and Iran.

[64] A Georgian delegation composed of Chkhenkeli, Zurab Avalishvili, and Niko Nikoladze went to Berlin to negotiate a treaty — which was aborted by the German collapse in November.

[65] Anton Kernosovsky [ru], writing in 1938, reports the Russian casualties for the campaign as: 22,000 killed, 71,000 wounded, 6,000 captured and up to 20,000 frostbitten; giving a total of 119,000 as well as 8 guns lost.

[15] There were cases of Russian involvement in the massacre of Muslims, for example, on 5 October 1917, soldiers, incited by the Armenians, began to beat local Turks with butts.

Ottoman commander Ferik-Wehib-Ahmed wrote a letter to General Michail Przewalski [ru], which contained words of gratitude for the fact that the Russians were preventing the killing of civilians.

[72] There were separate episodes when the Russians stopped the Armenian robbers in order to return the property to the owners, for which local volunteers began shooting at the imperial soldiers.

On December 6, Felix Dzerzhinsky's dreaded secret police, Cheka entered the city, thus effectively ending all existence of the First Republic of Armenia.