It’s both. Yes, there is a general one year of basic service for young men, but Russia relies exclusively on professional contract soldiers in Ukraine.
Afraid not. I can tell you a thing or two about the initial (and so far the only one) draft wave because I witnessed it first hand.
It was announced in the summer of 2022 after the Istanbul talks in spring failed and it became obvious Ukraine has called Putin's bluff, so the gloves had to come off. The reservists (aka every male aged 25-40 who had completed the obligatory 1 or 2 year term when they were 1 8 started finding summons to active duty in ther mailboxes, taped to their doors or, in a few rare cases, delivered by nice people in uniform in person. This stirred the society something fierce: a lot of the younger crowd, mostly IT-sector and skilled white collar workers, fled to the -stans and whatever European country they could reach, easy enough thing to do when you are working remotely and for a European company anyway. Others took advantage of the exemption from active duty provided to military factory workers, medical staff and critial inrastructure engineers. Some plainly ignored the summons and...
Nothing happened. The borders remained opened, nobody was detained at the airports, nobody got shoved into a bus while walking their poor dog like those unfortunate Ukrainian bastards and nobody even got fined for not showing up to the recruitment station, although the government did implement the digital summons reform that makes it impossible to say you never received the paper because post office. No second wave of mobilization followed, a year went by, many of the panicked emigrants (though not all) returned because nobody wanted Russians either in Europe or in the -stans. Technically, the mobilization has never been cancelled and is still ongoing, but it's been two years since anyone got drafted. They switched exclusively to volunteers after that, provided an
extremely fat paycheck and so far it has been working. Nobody is protesting, although the majority of the populace is still unhappy with the conflict - for different reasons.
Except a personal friend of mine, the poor bastard, decided not to leave because he still believed the war would last three more months tops and he would be home by Christmas and actually showed up at the training center. It's been two years and he is still in the trenches, shooting at Baba Yaga drones that try to drop TNT charges on their positions at night. He's a completely different person now: lost weight, has a wild look in his eyes and complains about dissociating. Can't blame him, being ordered to collect headless corpses afrer an assault gone horribly wrong does funny things to people. I am doing my best to support him, but watching a friend develop PTSD in real time is not fun. I hope he makes it.
Notably, the draftees are used to hold positions and to man trenches. The assault brigades, where the losses are the highest, consist largely of the contract soldiers. By the way, drones do 80% of the work, and Ukrainians produce them on their own, so they are not as dependent on the American help as one might think. On the other hand, the US is providing Patriot missiles and AA-defense, so there is a reason Zelensky started yapping about "peace in the air" after Trump pulled the plug on the deliveries.
I want the war to end, I want my best friend back in one piece so we can fix his head, and I am extremely skeptical of any and all claims of peace being around the corner or the inevitable Russian victory until it starts translating into fewer bombs falling on him. I'd cross my fingers, but I've been keeping them crossed for a while now and nothing happened.
