So men get drafted for anything and women can volunteer for support services gotcha
But here's the thing - almost everybody wants to avoid the draft because there are many stories about 'Dyedovshina' which is when 'ghosts' (Russian slang for FNG) and so you end up getting beaten up by the second year 'Prizervniki' - the Dyedi or Grandfathers.
There are a million ways to get out of it, either through bribes, or getting Medex'ed or doing OTC at uni which counts as doing service, so comes to pass that the only the very poorest and roughest people end up in the military, because they haven't enough influence to dodge it.
I've seen plenty of Prizervniki on bases, and assisting at reenactments (which they like doing because its an easy detail that mainly involves lounging around in the sun)
Some people who've been through the draft say it's more a case of it being a boring waste of two years than a living nightmare, but it is true that bullying is a big problem and much of it is caused by the apathy and corruption of the senior officers.
They are taking steps to improve the situation but it will take a long time to weed this long institutionalised bullying out - if ever.
The truth? I don't know. The soldiers I've seen look okay, but I haven't seen what goes on behind the scenes.
The problem I think is that with any draft you get people who are forced into a military environment that are totally unsuitable in every way for it, but again, they need the manpower to maintain the army, so they have to force men into the army to sustain that need.
However....
15/01/2009 | Moscow News ¹01 2009President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree reducing the number of military personnel in the Armed Forces in yet another step towards a transforming the Russian Army into a professional, contract-based defense force.
According to the new decree, issued earlier this week, by Jan.1, 2016, the Army and Naval Fleet will consist of 1,884,829 people, including civilian personnel. Military personnel will number 1 million, down from 1.3 million. Another major difference is that military personnel will consist largely of contracted soldiers, rather than conscripts.
In February, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov issued a directive to start creating educational groups in the St. Petersburg Military and Space Academy, the Moscow Military Command High School, and other cities across Russia. Each group will consist of 100 people taken from volunteer soldiers and conscripts. The educational groups will train professional sergeants, who will graduate after two and a half years in the facility.
"After they complete the training, the contract sergeants will get a diploma for higher specialized education," the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted General Staff Chief Nikolai Makarov as saying. "They will direct military collectives on a professional basis." Graduates from these educational groups will be used to staff military units of permanent combat readiness.
The decrees are part of a federal program that aims to transfer sergeants and other officers serving in the military to a contract-basis. Today, most sergeants and many other officers in the Russian Armed Forces are conscripted. The program stipulates that by 2013 over 85,000 junior officers will be professional rather than conscripted.
Earlier last fall, Serdyukov had announced one of the most radical measures to reform the army, slashing the officer corps to about one-sixth of its former size and introducing changes to the command structure. The move, announced in October, was deemed necessary but controversial, because it would involve officers who could end up losing their jobs. Later, the Kommersant business daily reported that Nikolai Markov had signed a directive on "the inadmissibility of divulging information on the reform of the Russian armed forces." [/i]
Part of the problem is that even a totally professional Russian army is unlikely to be immediately able to provide soldiers with the conditions that would make the youth of Russia attracted to it.
Of course even if the money problem is settled, there is still a need for a system of guarantees and incentives that make service desirable and the army professional.
First, they would need to get housing and education, and secondly good pensions and benefits (including in the case of death of severe injury of a soldier), and finally career promotion. It is through those incentives that an army can raise its professional level.
And in the current economic crisis that money isn't going to be forthcoming.
Why not post photos at the top of the forum, so you could see 'em when you sign in?
The Admins of this forum could easily set this up, it's not that hard to do. 
I do it on the 1 forum I mod. and I see how it's done or handled on the other forum (the evil one) that I MP on. 
