March 9, 1992, Monday.
Commander Zhou arrived in Lutsk City, northwest of Kyiv, with his handpicked elite, along with Li Ye and Sun Xianjin.
As the plane was about to land, Li Ye and the others looked down through the cabin windows and felt that this was a textbook industrial city.
There were not many skyscrapers—only clusters of squat gray factory buildings and stretches of Khrushchev-era apartment blocks.
Still, this was already considered pretty good. Back when Li Ye and the others had flown over from the Far East and made stopovers in some cities in western Soviet Russia, those places had truly had nothing at all, their defining feature being pristine, untamed desolation.
Although Soviet Russia was the world's largest country by land area, only a small portion of its eastern regions was truly habitable. The rest was not worth developing in depth.
Thus, ever since the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the people of this land had yearned for Europe's prosperous territories. As for that so-called emperor who had proclaimed, "The capital is not all that far away," he was simply talking nonsense with his eyes open and blindly stirring up trouble.
If he truly tried to shift the country's strategic direction eastward, the musketeers under his command would replace him with another emperor by tomorrow.
Writing a poem to indulge yourself was one thing, but you wanted us to cross that freezing snowfield, suffer over sixty percent non-combat casualties, and fight a country with the world's largest population to the death?
What? Had those useless noblemen of Europe suddenly lost their appeal?
That was why places near Europe, such as Ukraine, had always been core regions that Soviet Russia focused on developing. Their industrial production capacity was even more vital than vital to the whole of Soviet Russia.