It was not easy building a loose general client government for the conquered planets. One of the biggest issues was who to give power, especially because those that might be an option did not want to cooperate.

Well, that was not entirely true. They did want to cooperate, but they did not want to be the face of the new government. The situation was not made any easier thanks to the strange nature of that governments future, tentatively named the Kyreikon Federation. The future was completely open, thanks to the UE parliament actually not having decided how that government shall look. Or rather, they have decided that that would be part of the peace treaty with the Kyreikon Empire.

This created a number of issues, the biggest being legitimacy. Interregnum governments always have issues with their legitimacy, but an interregnum government that did not even knew what it was an interregnum for, nor had any idea when it would be phased out or working on that phasing out process had even larger issues with legitimacy.

This all meant that the Kyreikon Federation only existed on paper, with the UE parliament being the current head of government and no official head of state existing. The situation got even worse thanks to the fact that the UE parliament had specifically chosen to not be part of the government of the Kyreikon Federation, but the overlord of that government.

Which in turn meant that there was no government. This was of course a situation which would not continue, or was in any way, shape or form stable. While the navy was not intended to exercise functions of government upon the Kyreikon Federation, it was allowed to do so in an emergency. It had far more rights to exercise that power on planets that had not yet joined the Federation.

Luckily the issue with the Federation had been caught before it became a catastrophe, which meant merely Andraskon was in the Federation. No others were deemed fit to join by the navy, although there was a continuously updated list of planets that could join as soon as the Kyreikon Federation was in any way a sensible and working government.

A common meme on the occupied Kyreikon worlds was that that time would never come. The admiralty generally agreed, although they still tried to hoist the duty of somehow governing those planets of to civilian authorities. In fact, they offered a program in which any government or group with at least some claim to be capable of forming a local government could petition to the local admiral to get permission to create a government in the name of the UEN. Assuming a number of public perquisites was met it generally took roughly 3 months of a very public process to allow the formation of that government.

This was very useful in keeping the population in line and Guerrilla campaigns at a minimum. Still, some planets could never be truly pacified, which would prove to be the biggest source of casualties, thanks to the mandate of the UE as a humanitarian mission, during the entire war.

The UE’s forgotten second offensive by Jarine Telor

…It was again a political impetus that provoked the offensive. But this time the politicians did not want an ambitious offensive taking ground. In fact, they did not want any ground taken, considering that there were still the issues with the Kyreikon Federation. It was already obvious that those would never be solved, but a plan to unify and, more importantly, codify the UEN system needed to be created. The offensive had mostly the goal, at least from the perspective of the politicians, to be capable of saying that the UE was doing its utmost to defeat the Kyreikon enemy, pointing to the active offensive.

Of course, most of that was clear propaganda and would prove mostly useless. But the navy used the opportunity well. Instead of attempting to take worlds, which they were not allowed to do so anyways, they focused on taking away the Kyreikon’s mobile elements, making them less capable of offensive actions, as well as smashing their military industry. This would prove to be a total and utter success, as well as laying down the foundations for the next big round of taking planets away from the mighty colossus that was the Kyreikon Empire.

Even though the UEN attacked even targets that might be civilian in nature, only tangental connected to the Kyreikon military, they were very careful about it. They also kept meticulous records and offered to provide compensation to either the damaged persons or their heirs, after a peace treaty was signed. At the beginning the Kyreikon elite feared that that was something the UE would then demand in reparations, ingratiating themselves to a significant and important chunk of their population, all the while weakening the Empire, but then they slowly began to realize, mostly through imported UE propaganda, that this offer was not only genuine, but also that the UE would foot the bill. The elite had already accepted that this war would end in a defeat, having realised the absurd size of the UE and its enormous industrial potential, fighting the war mostly because they had not found a way to offer negotiations that would not look like weakness, as well as that they feared an internal coup if such an attempt was made regardless.

The UE had not offered to begin peace negotiations because of its mostly unmovable targets, ill-defined as they were and the anger the UE high command was still feeling

This state of affairs would continue for the foreseeable future, ending in more than 12 million lives needlessly lost, because no-one bothered to send an offer of negotiation.

The Kyreikon had another issue. There were other star empires out there, which would strike if the Kyreikon Empire showed any weakness. And those did not have the UE’s constraints against genocide.

Funnily enough, had such an attack happened, and the UE had figured it out, it would have offered the support of its fleets and industrial base, pending a very generous peace deal. In fact, the UE had such a peace deal prepared. Because just because they were the enemy, that did not give anyone the right to enact genocide upon them.

On the other hand, if the Kyreikon Empire had genocided anyone during that time, things would have gotten very ugly, at least if the UE had figured that out.