Russo-Ottoman wars of the 18th and the 19th centuries generated a voluminous literature consisting of private memoirs and accounts of campaigns written by the Russian participants. A significant place in these accounts was devoted to the environmental peculiarities of the Danubian war theatre. This paper examines the ways in which the Russian military writers discussed the influence of the environment upon the character of the Russo-Ottoman warfare. Unlike the campaigns of the Russian army in Central, Southern or Western Europe, the wars that took place on the Danubian-Pontic frontier were seen as conditioned by adverse geographical, climatic and epidemiological conditions. Environmental factors were used to explain the military qualities of the Ottoman adversary and of the local civilian population. They also helped Russian military writers to justify certain heterodox practices of warfare as well as to challenge the applicability of the precepts of the European military science to the campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately, the focus on environmental peculiarities contributed to the process of military “orientalization” of the Ottoman Turkey, whereby a war with it came to be seen as entirely sui generis. This Russian military Orientalism was further complicated by the emergence during the 19th century of a nationalist strain in the Russian military thought, in which the experience of the “Turkish campaigns” was seen as the root of the Russian military traditions. In conclusion, the paper examines the impact of the Europeanization of the Ottoman army upon the Russian military Orientalism in general and the discussion of the environmental factor in the Russo-Ottoman wars in particular.