Both TD and TS have game speed sliders. Though normal is indeed quite slow and fast quite comparable to normal speed in Starcraft. What I really can't understand why those games also have slow and very slow settings. I don't see how anyone would ever want to do that, at least in single player. With the controls being a bit clunky, playing multiplayer matches with massive armies would be pretty chaotic.

Russia is indeed marked as GDI in one of the cutscenes. As I understand, Tiberium and Red Alert are completely different universes with just some background cameos as jokes.