Daily Journal:

Has anyone looked into the 1995 Military Duty Law? In our country, people who are born with an expunged criminal record are called up. The generals don’t read their own law, that’s understandable. Nothing changed. According to our legislation, if a person has been convicted, served his sentence and the court has expunged this conviction, the person is considered unconvicted. We now have no Soviet recidivists. Why can’t someone who has no criminal record be summoned? The court gives a certificate because the period before repayment is still short. Naturally, someone who is imprisoned for murder simply will not be released by the age of twenty-seven. And one more thing: I don’t like that they attack our young people and accuse the guys who, for various reasons, were once punished one way or another - some on probation, some in a colony - of being the reason for all the evil in military units. All the evil and all the crimes in military units come from the officers, and not from these guys. In my memory, in twenty years there have been maybe two or three cases in which someone who had been previously convicted was obviously to blame for beatings, and then a very long time ago. Another thing is that it is clear that if a young man was in our Russian prison, then he simply I am unfit for conscription. I see this as pure demagoguery, because no one listens to military doctors, us, or prosecutors. Our main recruiters from the Main Organizational Directorate and the Directorate for Educational Work of the General Staff are trying to portray some kind of phantom picture: we can call up three hundred thousand, because previously we supposedly didn’t call up those whose criminal record had been expunged. Nonsense. They will recruit at the expense of the sick, one hundred percent, I bet on a box of Georgian wine. Now the replenishment will begin, and immediately the doctors in the military units will begin to rack their brains about what to do with these soldiers, because military clinics have been reduced, hospitals have merged, and it is not known what to do with sick recruits. And the military commissars will receive a bonus. And the main organizational management will receive a prize, and maybe a medal. These are thimbles. At whose expense will the plan be carried out? At the expense of the sick and, naturally, at the expense of those children who lost their deferment - technical school boys who entered technical schools after the eleventh grade and who are now eighteen. In fact, this call is fraught with a simple thing: our system of secondary vocational education is being eliminated. Because they completed their course, and now they will be called up. And what will happen next? Where will the teachers go? The groups will be merged. The main technical specialties are male. And our secondary vocational education will collapse completely. And we have four and a half thousand secondary vocational educational institutions. These are construction workers, mechanical engineering, heavy metallurgy, and radio instrument making.