Russia has taken to chemically lowering its soldiers’ inhibitions to guarantee these ill-trained civilians and convicts continue to fight no matter the odds in the ongoing war in Ukraine, according to a UK defense think tank.
Russia has taken to chemically lowering its soldiers’ inhibitions to guarantee these ill-trained civilians and convicts continue to fight no matter the odds in the ongoing war in Ukraine, according to a UK defense think tank.
I think that might be the important distinction. Or at least, that it depends strongly where along the spectrum of routine-ness it falls. For example, technically speaking, the US has had conscription to this day too (in the sense that the Selective Service is a thing), but since the annual draftee quota has been zero since 1972 it doesn’t really count.
Wikipedia says that “as of 2021, all male citizens aged 18–27 are subject to conscription for 1 year of active duty military service in the armed forces, but the precise number of conscripts for each of the recruitment campaigns, which are usually held twice annually, is prescribed by particular Presidential Decree,” but nothing in that article mentions how large those precise numbers of conscripts tended to be in the decades leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, so I still don’t really have a sense of scale for how Russia falls on the “peacetime draft exists only in name” <-> “literally everybody spends a year in the military” spectrum.