linguistic:translation, linguistic:paraphrasing
Declaration of War

As a result of Vienna 's declaration of war on Serbia, Nicholas II ordered the mobilisation of 4.9 million men. Germany, Austria-Hungary's ally, saw the call to arms as a threat; when Russia mustered its troops, Germany affirmed the state of "imminent danger of War", followed by the declaration of war on 1 August 1914. The Russians were imbued with patriotic earnestness and Germanophobic sentiment, including the name of the capital, Saint Petersburg, which sounded too German for the sake of words Sankt- and -burg; and was thus renamed to the Russianised Petrograd.

The Russian entry into the First World War was followed by France, which both had been allied with Russia since 1892, fearing the rise of Germany as the new power. The German General Staff had therefore devised the Schlieffen Plan, which first eliminated France via nonaligned Belgium before moving east to attack Russia, whose massive army was much slower to mobilise.