[quote=@Inkwell] Totally understand your points. Will change it so that most industry in the country is cottage industry. Maybe one or two repurposed workshops or factories in 1960. Also will make it so the defensive line is just bunkers made from leftover stone from the mines. I may also say there is an unspoken none aggression pact with Georgia as attacking each other would just be to hard in the mountains. As such the countries sometimes share information with each other and in rare cases work together. Maybe one or two of the rebel factions that have the mentality the enemy of my enemy is my friend and are working with my country. Also maybe a few rebel groups are hiding out in the mountains of my country as well as criminals. Overall I think my country should be able to provide for its own people just about. But I imagine my country is lacking in modern equipment, intellectuals, industrial power and severe lack of potential external trade. Anything that you don't think I have addressed let me know. [/quote] And how are you going to get the stones to the mines? Trucks? How are you getting the fuel to run the trucks. From within your borders? Oil's on the other side of Southern Russia and local fuel sources would be heavily fought over as much as mineral mines. From outside? How are you paying? This is a part of Russia that's by and far largely all farms, and who would trade with an economy as gutted as Russia and with a party in the larger conflict without a currency, or whose currency would be so poorly backed and non-established it's basically worthless. And let's say you can, how are these being managed? You'll need parts to replace on these vehicles, they'll inevitably break down or come on accidents and attrition will slowly break down the logistics between mines and the front. So you'll need replacements, and replacements come from factories. how are the factories being operated? There may not be any electricity, or there'll be a shortage of energy to run them consistently. Cottage industry may not be able to catch up with such industrial demand. And then you get the stone to the front: you'll need concrete. And assuming Caucasian stone is limestone and not something like granite you won't be able to make concrete to adhere it all together so it holds up to mortars if the enemy has that. And how are you going to grind the stone to a usable powder to make concrete? Heavy grinders are needed for that. And then we come back to transport: so assume you don't have heavy transport and you're using horse and mule-drawn wagon. That takes time, the same as grinding stone from mines to a usable powder for concrete, assuming it's limestone or a calcium-based rock. And by the time you get one Hoxha Brand (tm) bunker down the enemy has already moved around utilizing the great expanse of the southern Russian steppe to high-mobility advantage. The best field fortifications would be what man can dig with a shovel on a spot and if or when available timber supports to hold up the earthwork banks. And onto civilian services: if no fuel whose driving cars? There'd be no ambulances, no power from the power plants. Electricity wouldn't work and phone service would be dead or spotty if there was electrical power. Infrastructure like this is a large national affair and implies a strong economy. The region would be set back to 1860. Supplying basic needs like food and fire-wood as fuel or even managing livestock would certainly be a service that persists, but it'd likely be rendered in the old peasant world of mutual aid and village-to-village assistance living outside of the political paradigm and just floating with whoever says they're in power. They would throw their lot into a militia organized by your government but that would honestly be the limit, and only so much as they can afford since they're walking out into the fields now to reap their wheat and barley with sickles and baskets to harvest it as they may have been doing for centuries. Southern Russia would be very much a land of overlap realistically with only firm grasp of prominent cities where the urban population would be severely dependent on the government to keep them from starving or managing what little resources they have to address the handicaps to have some minimal level of life; what can be done to keep them from starving, dying of preventable disease, and some minor police and fire protection. And beyond there they'd be in open competition with everyone else and competing over the villages with the other factions. As my Russian friend said in his experience with the Southern Russia, think more in terms of Cossack LARPing than trying to be a Russian Republic in miniature. Western Russia might be able to pull it off better because they have the infrastructure, but they also need regions like the Caucus and Siberia to run it, and they're either poorly developed because all that development is in Moscow and Saint Petersburg or these regions are vastly underpopulated. [img]https://cdni.rbth.com/rbthmedia/images/web/en-rbth/images/2013-06/top/Cossacks-top.jpg[/img] [img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Russian_cavalry.jpg/300px-Russian_cavalry.jpg[/img] Another comparison would be: like depth-of-Civil-War-Somalia, but add more slav.