However, even before Milyutin's 1857 proposal, in 1856 Russian forces had already been evicting Crimean Tatars and Nogais, and this has been connected to the Circassian evictions by some authors such as Rosser-Owen. As Russian armies advanced in Circassia in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Circassians were evicted from their lands so they could be settled by loyal Cossacks as the Russian military elite developed a belief that Circassians would have to be entirely expelled from regions for the security of Russian rule.