East-West divide
In France, the reintroduction of a voluntary service comes almost four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For those on Russia’s doorstep, however, the comeback of mandatory schemes has been a no-brainer and has followed the relentless pace of Moscow’s offensives.
After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Lithuania was the first to reintroduce compulsory military service, followed later by Sweden and then Latvia after Russia launched its war on Ukraine in 2022.
“The primary objective is to reinforce military capacity from a quantitative perspective. The sheer reality is that when you face a national crisis or conflict, you need people roughly capable of responding with a basic level of skills,” said Linda Slapakova, a defense specialist at Rand Europe.
Meanwhile, popular support for national service has soared, particularly in Nordic and Baltic countries. In Finland, which shares a 1,300 kilometer border with Russia, support for defending the homeland has reached record highs. In 2022, 83 percent of Finns believed in defending their nation, up from a low of 65 percent in 2020, according to the country’s yearly polling.
But in the West, further from the existential threat posed by Russia, the conversation is a lot more complicated.
“The core of the issue these days is that countries sharing a border with Russia feel the threat much more acutely than others, who feel protected by their geography,” said Katrine Westgaard from the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “Finland, Baltic states, Norway, Sweden, Denmark have tackled this challenge for longer. There is more hesitation in countries like Germany, the U.K., France, and both geography and culture have something to do with that.”