A brief scroll of Wikipedia (the sources seemed legit) shows that, for example, Cuba (which I'm assuming you admire?) has mandatory military service, no known policy of alternatives for conscientious objectors, and harsh punishments for evading it even in peacetime, to the point that people have attempted to injure themselves to get out of it. They haven't been tried in modern war, but can't see them suddenly relaxing the rules when actually tested. Border countries tend to take defence very seriously.

For countries and cultures bordering Russia, this really is an existential question. The forced population transfer/ethnic cleansing of Tatars, Ingrians, Chechens and Ingush, Balkars, etc. show what tends to happen. And before you say "well that was Stalin", I'll point to the Russification efforts of Alexander III and Nicholas II, and to... well, just about all speakers of Uralic languages still existing in Russia, facing steadily or rapidly declining numbers. Also the number of people identifying as ethnic Russians in the Baltics and Crimea, directly attributable to said forced population transfers; Transnistria, where the change happened more organically but was nonetheless used as an excuse for invasion; and to some degree in eastern Ukraine, that saw significant russification attempts and Russians moving in to man the industrial centers during SU, inflating the numbers of ethnic Russians and prevalence of the Russian language at cost of the native population.