Military service in the Russian army: energy drinks against the draft

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DOXA opens a window to Russia with the following article. You can find the whole article in Russian here.

Russians who do their basic military service are also involved in the war against Ukraine. The Russian Defense Ministry now admits that conscripts have even been taken prisoner by Ukraine. DOXA spoke to men who completed their military service in 2025 and 2026 and to conscripts who are currently serving. What they report is shocking.

Like Vlad. He is a student at a university in a Russian region. After the winter examination phase in 2025, he was exmatriculated and received a call-up notice in the spring. He looked for ways to avoid military service and decided to fake high blood pressure. This is an exclusion criterion for military service.

Since 2024, conscription has been mandatory for men aged 18 to 30; basic military service lasts twelve months. In the days leading up to the medical examination, Wlad drank four cups of black coffee and several cans of energy drinks every morning, and he exercised intensively. When measuring blood pressure, he also pressed his feet firmly against the floor so that the measuring device showed higher values.

Doctors became suspicious and fitted him with a 24-hour blood pressure monitor to check his health. He did squats and push-ups all night long and drank energy drinks.

“When I walked into the exam room at the next appointment, I saw a whole bunch of guys in their underwear,” Wlad tells DOXA. "One had a back like a question mark, the next felt like minus 100 diopters, a third was obese, and all of them were declared fit for military service! Then I realized that, given my state of health, there was no point in even trying to avoid military service." A few weeks later, Wlad was already at a distribution center.

Many of the conscripts DOXA spoke to report that soldiers are forced to do work they consider “undignified.” For example, one of the interviewees was assigned to dig a pit for feces. The Russian army has its own language for this. All recruits are generally referred to as “elephants”: they are clumsy and will obey any orders without thinking.

Kirill from Krasnoyarsk joined his unit in the Far East in the spring of 2025. According to him, there were only two doorless showers available for almost 200 soldiers, which only had ice-cold water. Everyone had about 30 seconds to shower because a line was already forming behind them. After a few weeks, a third of the company was in bed with pneumonia or bronchitis.

For Wlad, underwear was a problem: "Private underpants are forbidden. If they are searched, they will be taken away. The underwear issued by the military is put in the laundry together by the entire company." After washing, they are distributed randomly. Wlad: "So you can get someone else's underpants and they can be torn. That's why I set aside two pairs for myself and wash them myself throughout the year."

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