 Rosser-Owen, meanwhile, portrays both London and Istanbul as having been constrained by pragmatic concerns, at a loss for what to do about the flood of refugees, and notes the hardships suffered by British consular staff as they tried to help the Circassian refugees as well as the improvement of Ottoman policy toward accommodating the refugees over time so that by 1867 when the final Abkhaz refugees were transported, there were many fewer deaths in the process.Whereas Richmond argues that Western European indignation at the unfolding situation in Circassia arose only after Russia leveraged the Porte to gain special rights in the Dardanelles thus threatening their trade interests, Rosser-Owen emphasizes that the philanthropic efforts of British organizations and that the concern for the well-being of Circassians was most intense in Scotland where Circassian struggles were compared to past traumas in then-recent Scottish history.Although the order given by Tsar Alexander II was to deport the Circassians rather than to massacre them, the Russian commanders were open to the idea of massacring large portions of the Circassian population, and General Fadeyev wrote that the Russian command decided "to exterminate half the Circassian people to get the other half to lay down their arms."