Pretty much that, yes. Serednya Slaviya's made of an portion of northwestern Ukraine that went independent in the 1910s and got swallowed up into the Warsaw Pact, and only broke into freedom in 1991. It's not a large country, with a current population of 2,184,000 and a land area of 15,520 square miles, in a roughly square shape. If you want to look up more about it, research the Volyn and Rivne oblasts of Ukraine.
Militarily there's 12,643 personnel under arms, with 11,508 in the Land Forces and 1,135 in the Air Force. Under Soviet times the Land Forces was a bit larger, and made up a complete Motor-Rifle Division; since then I've trimmed it down by about 20% into the military that it is now. That left me a large amount of vehicles, which has a surplus that can be sold on the open market. That's probably where I started my procurement from, getting rid of BMP-2s and extra BTR-80s and other hardware.
I picture Serednya Slaviya as having a decent civilian-market factory setting; there's a tractor and engine plant in Rivne (along with a nuclear power plant) but I don't see much in the way of homegrown military hardware. The heavy industry required for armor working and building armored vehicle chassis just isn't there. Small things like VBLs with what amounts to structural steel, okay, I can build those but it's basically a glorified offroad mini-SUV. Electronics...would be imported; I'm dealing with a country that still manufactures vacuum tubes in large numbers. It's a bit behind the times.
As far as comparitive nations go, Slovenia's got a similar population but half the land area. However...a quick check shows they produce their own armored personnel carrier, with help from GenDyn Land Systems Europe. The Valuk isn't heavily armored, only against 12.7mm fire from the front 30 degree arc and 7.62mm fire around the rest of the vehicle. That's not that heavy, and gives me a baseline to work with.
Comparing that to the Freccia and Centauro, well, the Valuk's half their mass so that tells me the armor plate is probably around twice as thick, plus ceramic plates to aid in protection. I suppose I could end up building my own vehicles, licensed production with some technology transfers and bootstrapping of industry from Italy. At the very least, I should be able to maintain and repair the things, if I can't find a way to build them in-house. Something like a VBL, definitely built locally under license.
Soviet Green...it's made of people! Seriously, I figured on a generic olive drab/medium green for my vehicles, something that would blend well in a forest since there's a large amount of woodlands in that portion of Ukraine. Since I'm my own country, I can decide my own color schemes; one benefit of going independent.
I want to try to stick with NATO equipment, since we joined in 1999. But damnit chanman, you made me go look up Chinese hardware just to look at what's available and I found
the Type 08 AFV family that includes a gun carrier with a Chinese copy of a British L7 cannon. It's also got an IFV and APC and artillery and more variants as well, and the biggest thing is that they're all amphibious somehow. They're also dirt cheap due to the Chinese producing five thousand of the things; at 1.6 million USD that beats out even the Freccia's 2.5 million USD.
The IFV even carries Soviet weapons; it's got the same 30mm autocannon as the BMP-2 and carries Malyutka missiles, so I have the gun technology present already. The ZTL-11 carries the British 105mm gun, which is NATO ammunition compatible, so...damn, now I'm not sure. Go Italian or go Chinese? I can get minis from GHQ for both, so I'm not limiting my collection options there. This would be for the cavalry, which I should be able to afford to upgrade hardware wise and leaving the combined-arms battalions with legacy hardware.