Running nightly build 2020-09-14 on Win10 v1909, Java 8u261.
Playing as Sweden against 4 AI, but the Dutch were knocked out in 1600, and the Spanish lost the War of Spanish Succession.
I declare independence in Autumn 1634 and end turn. The game immediately proceeds to "Waiting for: Swedish Royal Expeditionary Force" and stays there indefinitely. It's not a complete hang, as the app is still responsive to commands from the View menu, but it's clearly not thinking any longer as the CPU% of the process is zero.
I tried running the savegame on older builds and got the same result going back to 2019-01-02. Before that the file is not backward compatible.
Interesting, I tried to replicate on a new save game and the REF worked.
git.eb846f3 fixes one crash on declaration that might be implicated here. However the log file contains a different crash that I can not reproduce. I have however cleaned up the code that caused it, so as to at least make the problem easier to find next time (git.0ce1257).
If I use your saved game there is yet another crash. This one is due to the REF failing to build due to it lacking any ships, which is weird but not impossible. That is now fixed in git.ff7c5ca. With that fix in place I can declare independence and next turn watch the REF roll in.
Setting to Pending until release.