Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"That Russia had arrived as a maritime power, however, was advertised dramatically on 24–26 June 1770, when a fleet which had sailed from the Baltic via the North Sea inflicted on the Turks at Chesme in the Aegean one of the most crushing defeats in the history of naval warfare." [Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 104] "The scale of Russian victories, which included the astonishing feat of sending a fleet from the Baltic to the Mediterranean to destroy the Turkish fleet at Chesme in June 1770 (a battle to compare with Lepanto or Trafalgar), raised the possibility of a Russian conquest of the entire Balkan peninsula and the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. [Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 588]