https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Port_Arthur

With a spotter on a phone line at the vantage point on 203 Meter Hill overlooking Port Arthur harbor, Nogi could now bombard the Russian fleet by heavy 11-inch (280 mm) Howitzers with 500-pound (~220 kg) armor-piercing shells. He started systematically sinking the Russian ships within range.

On December 5, 1904, the battleship Poltava was sunk, followed by the battleship Retvizan on December 7, 1904, and the battleships Pobeda and Peresvet and the cruisers Pallada and Bayan on December 9, 1904. The battleship Sevastopol, although hit 5 times by the howitzer shells, managed to move out of range of the guns. Stung by the fact that the Russian Pacific Fleet had been sunk by the army and not by the Imperial Japanese Navy, and with a direct order from Tokyo that the Sevastopol was not to be allowed to escape, Admiral Togo sent in wave after wave of destroyers in six separate attacks on the sole remaining Russian battleship. After 3 weeks, the Sevastopol was still afloat, having survived 124 torpedoes fired at her while sinking two Japanese destroyers and damaging six other vessels. The Japanese had meanwhile lost the cruiser Takasago to a mine outside the harbor.

On the night of January 2, 1905, after Port Arthur surrendered, Captain Nikolai Essen of the Sevastopol had the crippled battleship scuttled in 30 fathoms (55 m) of water by opening the sea cocks on one side, so that the ship would sink on its side and could not be raised and salvaged by the Japanese. The other six ships were eventually raised and recommissioned into the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The capture of Port Arthur and the subsequent Japanese victories at the Battle of Mukden and Tsushima gave Japan a dominant military position, resulting in favorable arbitration by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war. The loss of the war in 1905 led to major political unrest in Imperial Russia (see: Russian revolution of 1905).

At the end of the war, Nogi made a report directly to Emperor Meiji during a Gozen Kaigi. When explaining battles of the siege of Port Arthur in detail, he broke down and wept, apologizing for the 56,000 lives lost in that campaign and asking to be allowed to kill himself in atonement. Emperor Meiji told him that suicide was unacceptable, as all responsibility for the war was due to imperial orders, and that Nogi must remain alive, at least as long as he himself lived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Question

In diplomatic history, the Eastern Question was the issue of the political and economic instability in the Ottoman Empire from the late 18th to early 20th centuries and the subsequent strategic competition and political considerations of the European great powers in light of this. Characterized as the "sick man of Europe", the relative weakening of the empire's military strength in the second half of the eighteenth century threatened to undermine the fragile balance of power system largely shaped by the Concert of Europe. The Eastern Question encompassed myriad interrelated elements: Ottoman military defeats, Ottoman institutional insolvency, the ongoing Ottoman political and economic modernization programme, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism in its provinces, and Great Power rivalries.

>>14854934

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_relations_of_the_Great_Powers_(1814%E2%80%931919)

The Eastern Question emerged as the power of the Ottoman Empire began to decline during the 18th century. The Ottomans were at the height of their power in 1683, when they lost the Battle of Vienna to the combined forces of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria, under the command of John III Sobieski. Peace was made much later, in 1699, with the Treaty of Karlowitz, which forced the Ottoman Empire to cede many of its Central European possessions, including those portions of Hungary which it had occupied. Its westward expansion arrested, the Ottoman Empire never again posed a serious threat to Austria, which became the dominant power in its region of Europe. The Eastern Question did not truly develop until the Russo-Turkish Wars of the 18th century.

According to Karl Marx's writings around the Crimean War, the main factor of the Eastern Question was Russian imperialism towards Turkey – with Turkey being a barrier that would protect the rest of Europe, and thus England's interests laid with the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War.