Accordingly, on April 26, 1916—the first anniversary of the Treaty of London with Italy—France and Russia signed the secret Sazonov-Paléologue Treaty concerning their respective territorial rights in Asiatic Turkey. Russia was awarded full sovereignty over the vilayets of Trebizond, Erzerum, Bitlis, and Van—a vast area of 60,000 square miles (about one and one-fifth times the size of the State of New York), containing valuable mineral and petroleum resources. This handsome prize put Russia well on the road to Constantinople and in a fair way to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. And at the moment the treaty was signed the armies of the Grand Duke Nicholas were actually overrunning the territory which Russia had staked out for herself! For her part, France was to receive adequate compensations in the region to the south and southwest of the Russian acquisitions, the actual delimitation of boundaries and other details to be the result of direct negotiation with Great Britain.[24] Thus came into existence the famous Sykes-Picot Treaty of May 9, 1916, defining British and French political and economic interests in the hoped-for dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The Syrian coast from Tyre to Alexandretta, the province of Cilicia, and southern Armenia (from Sivas on the north and west to Diarbekr on the south and east) were allocated to France in full sovereignty. In addition, a French “zone of influence” was established over a vast area including the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Deir, and Mosul. Administration of this stretch of coast and its hinterland would give French imperialists what they most wanted in the Near East—actual possession of a country in which France had many religious and cultural interests, control of the silk production of Syria and the potential cotton production of Cilicia, ownership of the Arghana copper mines, and acquisition of that portion of the Bagdad Railway lying between Mosul and the Cilician Gates of the Taurus.[25] Aside from its satisfaction of French imperial ambitions, however, “the French area defied every known law of geographic, ethnographic, and linguistic unity which one might cite who would attempt to justify it.”[26]