Siege of Sveaborg

The Siege of Sveaborg was a short siege by Russia that took place at Sveaborg (Finnish: Suomenlinna) in early 1808, during the Finnish War.

A week before the war began, Sveaborg's commander Admiral Carl Olof Cronstedt received a letter from the King Gustav IV Adolf which required him to fit for operations and acquire crews for 2 hemmema-type archipelago frigates and over 70 smaller gunboats or yawls. Additionally, the letter demanded that the fortress of Sveaborg must be defended to the bitter end and should withdrawing from the fortress be necessary then the bulk of the coastal fleet which had been docked at the fortress for the winter as well as all the supplies had to be destroyed by burning them down.

Russian forces under Friedrich Wilhelm von Buxhoeveden laid siege to Sveaborg after the fall of Helsingfors on March 2, 1808. However the Russian force which had captured Helsingfors consisted only of roughly 2 000 men who had no chances in even just harassing the fortress. It took well into mid March before Russians had concentrated 4 000 men to area under General Jan Pieter van Suchtelen who started more effective sieging of Sveaborg by building first artillery batteries for the siege artillery in its vicinity. By early April Russians had amassed 6 500 men and 59 artillery pieces, some of which had been taken from Svartholm fortress after it surrendered, to besiege Sveaborg.

Defenders at Sveaborg often fired at the Russian cossack patrols on the ice around the fortress, but without any practical results. Instead of attacking the numerically inferior besieger, the Swedes were content to stay behind their fortifications and prepare for the Russian assault by sawing a ditch to the open the ice around the fortress. The first Russian barrages were fired on 19 March and continued until 21 March, after which first attempts to negotiate were made. Cronstedt agreed not to fire at the town of Helsingfors in exchange for the Russians keeping their artillery batteries away from that direction. This suited the Russians since it allowed them to lodge their troops in Helsingfors without danger of being shot at by the Swedish artillery.

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