If that’s true, then aren’t they victims of the lottery of birth who deserve our compassion and pity?

Did I say they don’t deserve compassion or pity? Deserving of it they may be, that alone might be even more insulting to them than what I said. One thing that didn’t change from Soviet era is that everyone must follow the political platform with a figurative gun to their head. It’s ok to say that the Russian invasion is wrong, and the US’s missiles and tanks will be blasting servicemen to bits who do not deserve to be blown to bits, but they will be violently killed, as it is a war.

Asking them nicely to stop invading isn’t going to work.

There’s definitely instances of Russian political dissidents being thrown in jail. And from there, they’d get sucked up into the jail-to-combat pipeline.

This isn’t strictly unusual for government agencies. The California state fire patrol is composed largely of prison labor. But training dissidents and vagrants in the art of war carries its own basket of problems. It only works if you do the Iran-Iraq War trick and have your dissidents-turned-soldiers in the worst possible conditions (in that case, Iranian Revolution student protesters were turned into shock troops expected to run across Iraqi mine fields).

In the current state of the Ukraine-Russia War, its the Russians hiding behind the mine fields and the Ukrainians charging across them. But I’m more than confident that there’s some other low-skill high-lethality job for them to do. Maybe playing “The Most Dangerous Game” against Ukrainian drones, so Russian anti-drone units can target and shoot them down.

The USA stopped using conscription because Vietnam was unpopular with everyone

The US stopped using conscription in January of 1973, two months before the last helicopters exited Vietnam. The major protests against Vietnam had largely fizzled out by the late 60s, as the war was primarily an air war focused on bombing and gassing Vietnamese dissidents into submission. And, if you’re truly familiar with your US history, you’ll know that this is when the popularization of the POW/MIA came to fruition thanks to the John Birch Society and Ross Perot.

But Nixon’s decision in '71 to end conscription was more to do with the success of the Civil Rights Movement in galvanizing former WW2, Korea, and Vietnam Veterans to its cause, when Nixon’s goal was to recast these dissidents as criminals and drug addicts. As the economy stalled out under his presidency, military enlistment was actually on the rise and conscription served no real purpose.

Conscription is still a thing in the USA, it just hasn’t been used since Vietnam.

Registration is still a thing, although even then there’s been a number of big fights over how one’s gender and sexual orientation would affect enlistment.

But conscription, as a policy, has been abandoned as the military has relied increasingly on its officer’s corpse and private contractor base to manage military operations. The political gains to an expanded MIC plus the liabilities of an armed and organized working class mean it no longer has a place in the model we use for conducting invasions and occupations.