Red for revolutionaires, dark gray for loyalists
It had all happened so fast, no one quite understood it. Following the successes of the Blitzkrieg into Alpia and the reunification and Anschluss of the Schrattals, the Kaiser had thought himself to be invincible. But this fortune had blinded him to what was going on in his own country. For more than a thousand years, the peoples of Iander had lived together largely peacefully. But times had changed. The peoples of Western Iander, the Germanians, saw themselves as elitists, who knew better how to control the massive country than the uncivilized rabble of Moskovia. Likewise, the Moskovi had grown tired of feeling like second-rate citizens, and there had for a few years been a mistrust towards Germania and anything related there to. Finally, the thin line that was stability snapped.
As if overnight, Marshal Mikhail Sergeyevich Karachenko, a distant relative of the Kaiser, had given an order to the Third Army, now renamed 1st Royal Army, to secure their baracks and the related cities. He urged others to join him, and many did. Before the Kaiser had even realized something was awry, more than three-quarters of Ianderian territory were under control of the revolutionaires.
Krasnoyamsk was the northern-most city on Krym, the large Ianderian peninsula in the Faretta Sea. Situated some 200 kilometers from the capital of Krym Sevastanya, the city of little over 50.000 was busy erecting defences against the inevitable attack of the Germanians. Krym belonged to the Uran Kazaki of Iander, the largest of the four Kazaki Khanates, though it was situated far from the Uran Khanate - a result of the Great Kazaki Uprising of the early 1800s. Hetman Anatoly Mikhailovich Lizvinskiy, the head of the Uran Kazaki, was looking over topographical maps, in an attempt to predict the most likely enemy lane of advance.
"Why does it have to be winter..." he muttered, annoyed. The thick ice that had already besieged the peninsula was thick enough that an advancing army might flank them, thus removing the painfully obvious bottleneck the enemy would be forced through to reach Sevastanya. Scouts reported of several thousand enemies, presumably the Zaran Khanate's soldiers. Lizvinskiy found it wrong that Kazaki should fight each other - they were brothers, in every way imaginable. But it seemed there was no choice.
There was a knock on the door, to which Lizvinskiy loudly and almost bombastically replied: "Vvodit'!"
The door was opened and Lizvinskiy's adjudant Sorokin led in two people. Sorokin, in a similarly loud and bombastic manner announced: "Hetman Anatoly Mikhailovich Lizvinskiy, representatives of the Mujin medical team with whom you wished to speak!"
Lizvinskiy nodded and gestured for his guests to near the heavy oaken table. "Kazak, samovar!" he called, to which a nearby kazak threw his boots together, bowing lightly as he left the room.
"Since I heard you would arrive," Lizvinskiy said in Malaya Moskovy, the language of the Kazaki, "I have been eager to meet you. I want you to understand that what you have volunteered for is no ordinary war - this is the People's War!" he said and clenched his fist. "For too long, these Germanians have been treating us as simpleminded nuffsaids-- Ah, but I shalln't bore you with politics.. Tell me, why have you come to Krym?" he said as the Kazak who had only just run off returend with a samovar and four cups, the pleasent odor of herbal tea spreading quickly in the room.
