Would that work? My understanding was that, aside from a minority of poor Cossacks who sided with the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks were a well-fed military caste fiercely loyal to the Tsar. They were closely associated with the tsarist regime, acting as the tsar's "shock troops" and carrying out massacres for him (and later the white army).
We're drowning in dramatic irony here. The main character complains his superiors are using "defense of the nation" as a catch all excuse. They're sending him to try to create a separatist puppet state from the most loyal ethnicity in the Russian empire. They're doing this to check the power of the Russian empire, which is already only a decade from collapse. They're doing that to support their misguided attempts at creating their own Japanese empire, which is also a totally doomed endevour that will eventually bring on the very destruction to Japan that it's ostensibly meant to prevent.
What a farce lol. Love that kind of stuff.