For more than two decades it has been standard practice in Russia: New conscripts doing mandatory military service have not been deployed on the front lines. It is codified in law and embraced by all parents hoping to keep their sons from the carnage of war.

But Ukraine’s lightning incursion into the southwestern Russia region of Kursk has upended that compact.

When Ukrainian troops poured into Russia on Aug. 6, Moscow was caught unawares. Suddenly the war had come to the conscripts, who were manning lightly guarded positions near the border.

Hundreds of conscripts were captured, while scores are missing and potentially dead.

Military deployment has been a sensitive issue for President Vladimir Putin. Moscow’s decision to thrust young, untrained soldiers onto the battlefields of Afghanistan and Chechnya helped to cement domestic opposition that compelled the Kremlin to end those conflicts.

So during the chaotic early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when it was discovered that several hundred newly drafted soldiers were in units that crossed the border, the president ordered military commanders to send them home.

“Only professional military personnel will carry out the assigned tasks,” Putin said on national television at the time.

When Ukraine crossed into Kursk, however, the Russian military did not withdraw the conscripts, and indeed some newly minted soldiers from distant regions reported to their families that they were being dispatched to Kursk as reinforcements, according to online posts from parents and independent Russian news reports.

Russian men between ages 18 and 30 must perform one year of mandatory military service, but under law they should not be deployed in combat without adequate training, and they cannot be dispatched outside Russia. Although the law sets four months as the minimum training period, the broad public understanding is that conscripts will be kept off the front lines.

Russian women are not subject to conscription, and although they can volunteer, the acceptance level often depends on recruitment needs. Much of the military is a volunteer force, with many soldiers lured from Russian penal colonies and by relatively generous pay.

The unexpected peril for conscripts in Kursk has set off a pitched battle online between proponents of the war, who accuse parents of mollycoddling their sons, and parents distressed that a long-standing tradition has been broken.

One senior Russian special forces commander recorded a screed admonishing parents to stop “sobbing” about their sons having to fight.

If young conscripts do not defend their homeland, Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Chechen Akhmat special forces, said in a video posted on Telegram, “I have one question for you: What use are you and your children to this country?”

Parents and others were quick to express outrage, criticizing what they said was a lack of proper training, poor equipment and the small number of offspring of the elite who are serving, among other issues.

“Before sending conscripts to combat conditions, teach them how to use guns and provide them with modern means of warfare,” wrote one woman identifying herself as Elena, in a typical comment. “They should not defend the borders of the Motherland with bare hands.”

Russia would require about 30,000 to 40,000 men to expel the Ukrainians from Kursk, military analysts say. The fact that it has been slow to deploy a force of that size is a sign that it lacks the necessary reserves, they said.

The Kremlin has said it is recruiting 30,000 soldiers a month, a number that is likely hugely inflated, the analysts said. Whatever the recruitment numbers, the lack of reserves to deploy in Kursk could indicate that so many troops have been killed or wounded that there is no elasticity in the system, they said.

“Russia faces a lack of manpower,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst, questioning the claim by Putin that the country had deployed almost 700,000 soldiers in eastern Ukraine. “These troops do not exist. That’s why Russia needs to use conscripts.”

Another reason that Russia has not sent more experienced soldiers to Kursk might be its determination to maintain momentum in eastern Ukraine, where it has been advancing with withering assaults. For Putin, the reward of capturing key territory there might be worth the risk of having families protest the use of conscripts.

The use of conscripts in combat has been considered a third rail in Russian politics, linked to concerns that it would foment a national anti-war movement.

In Soviet times, Russia kept a conscript army of several million men. The families of those dispatched to Afghanistan were told that the soldiers were building schools and planting trees. If they returned in a zinc coffin, the families were ordered not to open it, while the cause of death was usually listed as “fulfilling their international duty.”

In the 1980s, after Mikhail Gorbachev eased the limitations on dissent, protests began to erupt around the country and he decided to withdraw from Afghanistan. The toll from the decade was 15,000 men killed, far lower than the carnage in Ukraine. Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet, has documented the deaths of more than 66,000 Russians in Ukraine, acknowledging that its analysis most likely accounts for only about half of the actual death toll.

The Chechen wars, starting in the mid-1990s, spawned some street protests. Untrained conscripts were thrown into bloody urban fighting for which they were completely unprepared, according to reports in the then-independent Russian news media, prompting some parents to travel to Chechnya despite the danger to haul them bodily off the front lines.

Intense pressure from groups like the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia not only forced an end to the war, but also pushed the Kremlin to rewrite the rules so as to keep conscripts out of combat.

“The conscript issue is one of those hot-button topics for Putin personally because of Chechnya,” said Dara Massicot, an expert on Russian defense and security issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. The Russian leader has been “remarkably consistent” in avoiding using conscripts, she noted, adding that deploying ill-trained conscripts adds considerable political risk with limited military gain.

After the Kursk incursion, more than 12,000 people signed a petition against the use of conscripts, but there have been no reports of street protests.

In general, Russians show far less concern for the fate of former convicts or contract soldiers who are paid around $2,000 a month to fight in Ukraine versus conscripts, who have no choice but to serve and earn about $25 per month, said military analysts.

About 300,000 young men are called up annually, half in the spring and half in the fall.

In addition, the draconian jail sentences meted out to critics of the Ukraine conflict have largely neutered parent groups.

Dozens of mothers who raised questions in online forums about the use of conscripts declined to answer any questions for this article. One who did, a woman named Elmira, said her son, 22, a former medical student, was drafted in December. He belonged in the barracks, not in the trenches, she said in an interview, but would do his “duty” without complaint.

Conscript numbers from Kursk are largely opaque. Russia has not released any. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top military commander, said Tuesday that Ukraine had captured nearly 600 troops in the region. That number could not be independently verified, and it is unclear how many are conscripts.

On Aug. 24, Ukraine traded 115 Russian conscripts, some captured in Kursk, for 115 Ukrainian conscripts, according to officials in both countries.

Statements by Alaudinov, the special forces commander, and Russian military bloggers are a key indication that the Kremlin’s attitude toward using young conscripts in combat may be shifting.

One prominent military blogger, Anastasia Kashevarova, even blamed the conscripts themselves for their fate in Kursk. Those captured looked so relaxed, clean and well-dressed in pictures released by Ukraine that they were probably drunk when the Ukrainians invaded and surrendered without a fight, she wrote.

Few would make such blunt statements if they thought the Kremlin would punish them, analysts said.

Many who endorse using conscripts play to the macho sensibility prevalent in Russian society.

“Let a soldier be a soldier,” wrote one military blogger, while another with tens of thousands of followers on Telegram wrote that “a conscript is not a child.”

Comments written under those remarks indicated that some Russians endorsed that attitude. Mothers should not “make skirt-wearers out of their sons,” wrote one.

The most common reaction, however, was that the Russian state has provided insufficient training, weapons, food or clothing to new soldiers, and hence they should not be shoved into combat. One mother of a conscript mocked the idea that conscripts had been trained: “What can they do against professionals and hired killers? Nothing.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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