Bulgar khan Batbayan, warring with his relative Kotrag in 668, is temporarily driven into the Crimea.

Kotrag’s Khazars attack and eventually take the steppes between Don and the Urals, according to the treaty of 668 between Batbayan and the Khazar Khagan (Kaban) under which Batbayan and his sister Huba are taken prisoners.

Western Bulgar warriors will later adopt the practice of wearing Martenitsas—a small piece of adornment, made of white and red yarn and usually in the form of two dolls, a male and a female—in battle to remind them of the sacrifice of their ancestral relatives Batbayan and Huba.

Batbayan's Bulgars are an essential part of the ethnogenesis of the contemporary Balkars and probably in some scale of the Volga Tatars and Crimean Tatars, though the ethnogenesis of the eponymous inhabitants of modern Bulgarian is probably very little influenced by Batbayan's Bulgars.

When Great Bulgaria disintegrates under Khazar attack in 668, Batbayan's brothers part ways, leading their people to seek a more secure home in other lands.