[chico20854]

March 8, 1998

Alberta closes its borders to protect itself from marauders who are after the province's petroleum resources. Brigadier General Parker, the senior Canadian Army officer in Alberta, names himself Prime Minister of Alberta and establishes a capital at Bowden, where the refinery complex has not been completely destroyed, and a trickle of refined petroleum products enables the local government to retain a measure of autonomy. Alberta's self-isolation severs the supply lines from eastern Canada to British Columbia and has a crippling effect on the Canadian Army units fighting the Soviets in British Columbia and the Yukon Territory.

Unofficially,

The Mexican government makes a formal protest about the death of its citizens in the Brownsville, Texas camp riot.

Dutch guerrillas in the town of Maastrich fire bomb the French gendarme station in the Mariaberg district, killing five of the occupiers.

Soviet, Hungarian and Czech authorities succeed in completing a continuous rail route between Uzhgorod, Ukraine and Munich, Germany, traversing Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. The route uses several sections of local track to avoid areas of the mainline that were damaged by NATO airstrikes, and the route is dependent on a POW camp at the Czechoslovakian-Soviet border for labor to manually transfer cargo from broad Russian-gague cars to standard-gauge ones.

Jugoslav rebel troops break through the defenses of the Zenica steel mill, headquarters of the 158th Motor-Rifle Division, which they have been attacking for several weeks. While some Soviet troops head into the catacombs winding underneath the plant to continue the fight, most of them (including the division commander) surrender. The commander of the division's northernmost and strongest motor-rifle regiment, the 549th, assumes theoretical command of the division's remaining outposts, all of which are surrounded by hostile troops and are largely out of communication

While few Soviet replacements are arriving at the front, those that do are most frequently mostly or completely untrained. The few older recruits (most recalled reservists to date have been in their 20s, but desperate authorities are dispatching men as old as 55 to the front, often as a means to reduce the number of mouths to feed in their local area) retain memories of their decades-ago military service. The younger ones, including women in their 20s and teenaged boys as young as 16, have had paramilitary training as part of their schooling but require training in their units.