Throughout the following two months, the ill-prepared and poorly equipped Serbian Army, though aided by Russian volunteers, failed to achieve offensive objectives.

An ultimatum given by European powers forced the Ottoman Porte to give Serbia a one-month ceasefire and start peace negotiations.

As a result, on 31 October 1876, Russia issued an ultimatum requiring the Ottoman Empire to stop hostilities and sign a new truce with Serbia within 48 hours, a demand backed by the mobilization of up to 20 divisions of the Russian Army.

[5] The Serbian Army was joined by southern Serbs who made up special volunteer detachments, a large number being from Macedonia, who wanted to liberate their home regions and unify them with Serbia.

[9] When peace was signed between the Serbs and Ottomans, these groups conducted independent guerrilla fighting under the Serbian flag, which they carried and flew far south of the demarcation line.

[12] The movement was strengthened when Mladen Piljinski and his followers killed a group of Ottoman Albanian haramibaşı, Bajram Straž and his seven friends, whose severed heads were bought as trophies and used as flags in the villages.

[12] On 20 January 1878, the rebels chose Orthodox priest Dimitrije Paunović, from Staro Nagoričane, and Veljan Cvetković, from Strnovac, as their leaders.

[13] On the morning of 21 January, the Serbian army entered the villages of Četirce and Nikuljane, to the excitement of the locals, who rallied on the icy banks of the river Pčinja.

The rebels had cleared the counties of Kumanovo and Palanka of Turks and Albanians, but following the peace treaty, beys, hodjas, soldiers, and refugees started to return to their houses.

[15] Rebels and prominent members of forty Serb villages gathered at the Zabel monastery in Nikuljane, where they decided to petition Prince Milan IV of Serbia for weapons.

[15] At that time, two other rebel envoys arrived at the village of Rataje near Vranje and met with General Jovan Belimarković, whom they asked for weapons.

[15] Upon hearing that they would receive weapons, the rebels were approached by villagers from Palanka and Kratovo, all the way to Deve Bair, the site of the Russian demarcation line.

[17] Haramibaşı Fehat (or Fetah) from Mutlovo, a girl named Halime, and a group of seven relatives, traveled to a house near Kozjak in an attempt to kill Velika Begovica, a notable female rebel.

[19] On 10 May, an assembly was gathered, in which the representatives of the nahiya of Skopje, Tetovo, Debar, Kičevo, Prilep, Kratovo, Kočani, Štip, Veles, and Kriva Reka, among others,[20] including the rebel leaders, kmets, and clergy,[18] signed a petition addressed to Prince Milan, the Berlin Congress, and Russia, for the annexation of those territories to Serbia.

[20] They asked Prince Milan "on their knees" to unite "our land and the Holy Mother Serbia, and to not replace the hard and grim Turkish (Ottoman) enslavement with the worser and darker Bulgarian one".

[20][18] As the Berlin Congress, which began on 13 June, approached, the Porte decided to destroy the uprising, which became an increasing risk to the Ottoman Empire.

[18] On orders from Istanbul, brigadier-general Hafuz Pasha departed from Pristina, and led five Ottoman camps with new cannon guns against the rebels.

[11] Three columns of chained, captured rebels, numbering 150 people, were led down the dusty Skopje road by Ottoman soldiers drunk on victory and the peasants' rakija.

[22] Several rebel leaders and their followers managed to escape into Serbia, where they settled in the depopulated counties of Toplica and Vranje,[16] and lived "hungry and humiliated... [while] help and awards were given to serve as pandurs" (policemen).

[19] Mass migrations from Macedonia into Serbia followed after reprisals, with their former villages being settled by Albanians (such as in Matejche, Otlja, Kosmatec, Murgash and others).

[11] A notable local, Stamenko Stošić Torovela, took the memorandum to Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, a Russian official and main Bulgarian supporter.

The official statement reads:[19] As Serbs of true and pure stock, of the purest and most intrinsically Serbian country... We for the last time implore on our knees... That we may in some manner and by some means be freed from the slavery of five centuries, and united with our country, the Principality of Serbia, and that the tears of blood of the Serbian martyrs may be stanched so that they, too, may become useful members of the European community of nations and of the Christian world; we do not desire to exchange the harsh Turkish slavery for the vastly harsher and darker Bulgarian slavery, which will be worse and more intolerable than that of the Turks which we are at present enduring, and will compel us in the end either to slay all our own people, or to abandon our country, to abandon our holy places, and graves, and all that we hold dear... [27]After the war, the Serbian military government sent armament and aid to rebels in Kosovo and Macedonia.

[29] The leaders were among the most influential in the districts of Kumanovo, Kriva Palanka, Kočani, Štip, Veles, Prilep, Bitola, Ohrid, Kičevo and Skopje.

[30] The appeal was signed by Spiro Crne, Mihajlo Čakre, Dime Ristić-Šiće, Mladen Stojanović "Čakr-paša", Čerkez Ilija, Davče Trajković, and 59 other rebels and former volunteers in the Serbian army.

[31] Viewed of as a continuation of the Kumanovo Uprising,[32] the Brsjak Revolt began on 14 October 1880,[33] and broke out in the nahiya of Kičevo, Poreče, Bitola and Prilep.

био cnyMaj са CiojaiioM Везенковипем,* kojh су радили на припреман>у македонског народа да спреман дочека почетак ...