In the first place, however much Tsar Alexander wanted an end to the war, he was in no mood to sue for peace. He was happy to present the fall as the loss of a campaign, but not of a war. He made this clear in a letter to Prince Gorchakov, now Russian Ambassador to Austria: "Remember 1812.... Sevastopol isn't Moscow. The Crimea isn't Russia. Two years after Moscow burned our troops were making their victorious entrance to Paris." And of course the position on the ground was not so bad. There were still 150,000 Russian troops in the Crimea, most of them well dug in in good strategically placed defensive positions. The Allies had 230,000, but were clearly undecided on how to use them to exploit their victory. Unsurprising, as there was no obvious 'jugular' to go for in Southern Russia - The Tsar was right; 'Sevastopol wasn't Moscow.' For him on the contrary, with Kars in Russian hands, and the rebel threat to his rear neutralised, Mouaviev was poised to launch an attack towards Constantinople through Anatolia.
Equally the British were not about to suggest negotiating, but the difference was that they had no desire for peace. For them, the fighting so far had ended with a disaster which they wanted to see avenged. True to form, because of the diverse controlling factions in their armed forces, they had started slowly, but after two years they were now reaching a peak as an efficient fighting machine. Plans were afoot to undertake a major combined operation in the Baltic in 1856, aimed at taking Kronstadt and hence St Petersburg. To the British government, the issues were simple. To achieve their war aims of keeping Russia out of the Mediterranean and maintaining Turkey as an effective buffer against Russian expansion, Russian military power had to be crushed.
On the face of it, France shared the British position. The June negotiations in Vienna had broken down because no agreement could be reached on the neutralisation of the Black Sea. Both powers feared a Russian coup - a lightning strike to capture Constantinople before anyone had the time to react - and Russian naval teeth had to be effectively drawn to prevent this. Also Napoleon had genuinely wished to follow up the Sevastopol success with a general offensive.
