Viktors Lusis

A child prodigy who graduated from the University of Riga with a degree in Marxist-Leninst theory at the age of 19, Viktors was at one point one of the youngest Majors in the Soviet Army. He always intended to resign from the military before age thirty in order to go into politics, but the war intefered with this. Believing that the Soviets were losing, he eagerly signed up with the Baltic Brigade after being captured by West German forces near Fulda during the early weeks of the war in West Germany. As the senior Latvian officer and a minor celebrity in his home country, he was put in charge of the Latvian component. When his commanding officer, an Estonian Colonel, was killed during an engagement with Soviet troops south of Gdansk, he became the Brigade's second-in-command underneath a Lithuanian Lieutenant Colonel, and when the Lithuanians separated themselves from the Brigade, he took over as commander.

Despite his leadership role and status as a national hero of Latvian independence activists, Lusis is mainly motivated by self-regard and laziness. He is capable of bravery and initiative but his fondest wish in life is to enjoy himself and be able to admire himself. He had planned to slide into a high-ranking, low-effort job in the Soviet nomenklatura, but the war ruined this plan. Now he is content to live what amounts to a life of comfort and ease in the context of post-war Poland. Left to his own devices he will happily remain camped out around the small group of Polish villages the Brigade controls enjoying reasonably ready access to food and fresh water, without taking on the difficult task of trying to reach Latvia. It is unlikely that his troops will tolerate this for long, but for now his charisma and war-hero status prevent more than the normal amount of grumbling.

Lusis is a tall, rangy man with a square jaw and wavy red hair which he grows long. He usually wears a West German officer's uniform bearing the distinctive tri-flag patch of the Baltic Brigade.