Free Republic

The face of Russia’s war in Ukraine has wrinkles. Photos documenting the first week of Russia’s mobilization order calling for 300,000 more soldiers to be drafted show older men being forced into the fight. Images from the rural province of Sverdlovsk reveal a pair of silver-haired soldiers arriving at a training barracks in central Russia. Some soldiers standing for inspection at a ceremony in Sevastopol displayed wrinkles and liver spots. One man, with a gray-streaked beard, held his AK-style rifle in a hand with three bandaged fingers. When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he was calling up hundreds of thousands...

My first experience of combat as a Marine was in Mogadishu, Somalia in the '90s and then subsequently I was in the first Marine division during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have completed tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, been involved in the evacuation of civilians from Libya in 2011 and commanded a special operations task force against the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2016...I have a greater respect for the ethical behavior of the Islamic State than I do for the Russians. That is no exaggeration.