Army with criminality

Representative of the General Staff, Major General Yevgeny Burdinsky, said that during the current spring conscription, people with expunged and expunged criminal records will be called up to serve in the army. There may be about one hundred thousand of them. He clarified, however, that we are talking, first of all, not about those in prisons and colonies, but about people with suspended sentences. During a round table dedicated to the problems of conscription, Burdinsky assured that “those who prone to theft, participated in a fight, committed murder. Each case involving a conscript must be previously considered and assessed.” Then he said that, if desired, the entire draft can be filled with citizens with an expunged criminal record. Earlier, Deputy Speaker of the Moscow City Duma Andrei Metelsky (United Russia) said that he did not see a problem in drafting those who had a criminal record. “A person who made a mistake cannot be made an outcast - we won’t hire you, we won’t take you to college, and you won’t serve in the army either. There is no need to produce repeat offenders,” he said. For his part, Alexander Kanshin, chairman of the commission of the Public Chamber of Russia on the affairs of veterans, military personnel and members of their families, who was present at the round table, was not delighted with Burdinsky’s statement. He recalled that when former criminals began to be drafted into the army in Soviet times, the level of barracks hooliganism increased. According to him, the army should be a school of education and training, an honorable duty, and not a conscription, so recruiting “everyone in a row” is “not good” - and so the younger generation suffers from old-timers. The idea of ​​calling up people with an expunged criminal record, naturally, did not appear from a good life: there is now a problem with recruitment, since those who were born in the early 1990s, when the birth rate was quite low, are being drafted.