Gaining Kamchatka was part of the peace accords following my second war with Russia, which actually went worse in a naval sense than the first war, but as in real life things don't always turn out as you'd wish or expect. The first war came as a bit of a surprise - I'd been expecting things to heat up with Austria-Hungary, but instead I found myself facing a handful of Russian cruisers harassing our Mediterranean shipping. My first battle of the game was a cruiser engagement, and started out as an underwhelming affair, with my small cruiser force (the light cruisers Nino Brixio, Taranto, and three supporting destroyers) sailing around futilely searching for enemies. I was a little confused at this point as to how the objectives worked in these scenarios, and there were no details to be found in the objectives tab - the Russians were attempting a bombardment, but I had skimmed that info in the pre-battle popup in my excitement to see some action. So we sailed around semi-randomly for around 15 hours, watching the sun sink and night fall, with occasional unclear reports of enemy sightings and unsettling gunshots in the distance.
The time limit for the scenario was coming up and I was resigned to an entirely unmemorable first 'battle', when at around 5:00am enemy warships were sighted, and the Taranto comes under fire - those small white circles!
Since then it's been mostly quiet going into 1910, but as you can see from the first screenshot, tensions with France are high, and they've been recently working on new battle cruisers. So we'll see what the future brings. Whatever the case, I'm excited to finish this campaign and start another, probably still with small fleets but perhaps a larger nation.