By Galina Korol | 2025-04-17

KYIV -- The spring draft has kicked off in Russia, as the shadow of the three-year-old invasion of Ukraine hangs over young Russian men.

The draft, if authorities' plans gain legislative approval, would expose draftees to conscription up to one full year after their draft summons and would take men with illnesses that would have been disqualifying in past years.

The media are calling it the largest one in 14 years. From April 1 to July 15, the authorities are preparing to draft a record number of conscripts: 160,000.

The size of the draft might be linked to Russia's staggering casualties.

By comparison, in the autumn draft of 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin conscripted 133,000 men.

Putin's most recent decree will call up Russian men aged 18 to 30.

The spring draft has become a trap for young men, who find themselves transitioning from "voluntary" to "involuntary" service, say observers.

'We're preparing for the worst'

"Since the spring 2025 draft just started, for now the legal enforcement is identical to the last one," Mikhail Liberov, coordinator of the Movement of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service in Russia (MCO), told Kontur.

MCO is a nonprofit that since 2013 has been helping Russians avoid military service.

However, it expects authorities to try implementing changes soon.

"Of course we're hoping for the best, but we're preparing for the worst," said Timofey Vaskin, a rights activist and lawyer for the Shkola Prizyvnika (Conscript School) human rights organization.

Legislators are discussing, albeit slowly, reforms that would lengthen the vulnerability window for conscripts and make even men with various diseases eligible for the draft.

One bill the Duma is reviewing would enable authorities to draft men up to one year after their draft summonses, if somehow they had not taken the men immediately.

Thus, the draft becomes a time bomb for men who received a summons but "for some reason weren't sent into the army during the last conscription drive," said Vaskin.

As of April 4, legislators had proposed a bit of protection for such men: they could tell their draft bureau that something in their lives had changed, making them unsuitable for service. The draft bureau, though, would rule on the validity of those pleas.

Russian authorities do seem desperate to swallow up as many men as they can, per a proposal in February from the Defense Ministry.

If the State Duma passes the relevant bill, conscripts with stage 1 hypertension and even syphilis could be drafted and deployed in various capacities.

A trap for many men

"Since the war started, every new draft has been a lottery," said Vaskin.

What sets this lottery apart is that with each passing year, the chances of drawing a lucky ticket wane.

"As we know, huge numbers of conscripts have died in various other wars, including in Afghanistan," Oleksiy Melnyk of Kyiv, senior expert in international politics and security and coordinator of international projects at the Razumkov Center, told Kontur.

"Even though Putin has said repeatedly that conscripts aren't sent into combat, we have evidence that conscripts were killed, such as in the Kursk operation [when Ukrainian troops held part of Kursk province, Russia, from August 2024 to March 2025]. And the majority of prisoners of war [in Kursk] were conscripts who essentially had been employed in the front-line zone and in the combat zone," he added.

"Conscripts are one of the most important sources to replenish the ranks of the contract army," said Vaskin.

Contracts for doom

Given the unpopularity of the draft, men who sign contracts to serve for pay have become the army's foundation.

Conning men into signing contracts protects authorities from "having to announce a controversial 'second wave' of [wartime] mobilization," said Liberov.

In September 2022, Putin announced a partial mobilization of reservists. More than 200,000 Russians immediately fled to Kazakhstan alone. The Kremlin since then has not announced a mobilization.

Men who join the contract army can encounter unexpected horrors: service can go on longer than the signatory ever dreamed of, and commanders can renege on promises of safe rear-echelon duty. Some conscripts even sign a contract without realizing it because commanders hide it in a sheaf of documents for them to sign, said Liberov.

Even though the contract indicates a specific mobilization period, this period automatically becomes indefinite.

"They're told, sign the contract for a year, you'll be at headquarters. Everything is like during the draft, just with a salary. But then all of a sudden, they're no longer at headquarters but instead are shock troops," Vaskin said.

The Kremlin resorts to subterfuge because the army is no longer appealing from the perspective of personal safety or future prospects.

"There are a number of things conscripts can expect to experience," said Liberov, including an absence of "medical attention," a surfeit of "psychological violence from commanders and comrades" and outright violence.

Moscow is not like the others

As the Kremlin looks harder and harder for men to fill its army's depleted ranks, even privileged Moscow is seeing violent roundups.

"Moscow doesn't have a rural population that sees the military as a social leg up. Here the salaries are higher, and college students don't want to lose a year of their lives," Vaskin said.

"Also, medical care and diagnostics are better, which means that you have a higher chance of getting a diagnosis that makes you ineligible for the draft."

As a result, Moscow repeatedly fails to meet its recruitment quotas. Law enforcement has resulted to raids, arrests and surveillance in the capital.

Facial recognition cameras play a role.

"Say a young man steps into the subway and a camera captures him. When he gets out at the next station, the police are already there waiting for him," Vaskin said.

Many such stories have occurred in Moscow, say rights activists. Draftees have reported the use of tasers and handcuffs to overpower them.

Authorities "kicked me, shoved me into a car, I screamed, and they dragged me along the ground," said a conscript whom Moscow police dragged to a draft bureau last autumn, according to a report by Shkola Prizyvnika published on April 3.