The war did not come from nowhere. Years earlier, King Wladyslaw IV of Poland had quietly courted the Cossacks, sounding them out over the wrongs they suffered and even, by some accounts, chartering them for a sea campaign against the Crimean Khanate. Whether Khmelnytsky truly carried the king's letter is disputed; the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky suspected it was closer to legend than fact. What is not in doubt is the anger that drove the Hetman south to the Lower Dnipro, toward others who felt as mistreated as he did. There he gathered allies and sent envoys to the Don Cossacks and to Bakhchysarai. When the Commonwealth's commanders learned of the stirrings, they dispatched a vanguard of some 3,500 soldiers under young Stefan Potocki to snuff the rebellion out before it could spread.

It spread anyway. Late in April the main Tatar force arrived at the Yellow Waters, and hours later the Cossacks joined them; by the end of the day Potocki's men were surrounded. What followed was less a single clash than a grinding siege of attack and counterattack, Tatars pressing by day and Cossacks by night, ramparts thrown up in the dark and torn down by dawn. Then came the moment that broke the Polish position from within. On 4 May, the registered Cossacks who had marched with the Crown Army mutinied, killed their officers, and went over to Khmelnytsky. The colonel Mykhailo Krychevsky, Khmelnytsky's old friend, was taken and soon joined the uprising too. The trap now had no weak side.

Cut off and shrinking, the Polish force tried to break out and run for safety, moving their wagons toward the ravines at Kniazhi Bairaky. The Tatars caught wind of the march and gave chase. Cossack artillery opened fire; Tatar riders, hungry for captives rather than corpses, pressed them to stop shooting so the prisoners could be taken alive. In the assault Stefan Potocki was wounded and command passed to another officer, but a hail of Tugay Bey's Tatar arrows shattered the last resistance. The relief force under the elder Hetman Mikolaj Potocki, Stefan's father, never closed the gap; word of his son's plight reached him too late, and his men got only within about a hundred kilometers of the field. The vanguard was annihilated days before help could arrive.

For the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Zhovti Vody was a catastrophe and an omen; for the Cossacks it was proof that the mightiest power in the region could be beaten. The victory sent Khmelnytsky's revolt surging outward, drawing more fighters to his banner and setting in motion the years of war that would eventually give rise to the Cossack Hetmanate. Later retellings sometimes flattened the eighteen-day ordeal into a single dramatic charge; the 1999 film With Fire and Sword reduced it to a doomed hussar attack, though in reality the Polish hussars were the backbone of a much longer, harder resistance. What remains here is a quiet river and open country, and the memory of soldiers on both sides who fought and died where the water runs yellow.