Ministry of Justice: 4,500 convicts agreed to leave prison for the front

4.5 thousand convicts agreed to leave prison for the front / Illustrative photo from open sources

About 4,500 convicts in Ukraine advocated the adoption of the law on parole by signing a contract for military service.

Deputy Minister of Justice Olena Vysotska told about this in an interview with Glavkom.

It is noted that in April, the Ministry of Justice conducted a survey among prisoners, where they were asked questions about release by signing a contract for military service.

«4.5 thousand convicts answered: «Yes». At the same time, it is worth understanding: the administrations of institutions serving sentences did not interview prisoners according to the articles of the Criminal Code, some of which are currently not subject to mobilization. Also, their state of health was not taken into account. And, I repeat, the most important criterion is motivation,» Olena Vysotska emphasized.

She noted that at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the ministry received more than a thousand applications from convicts eager to fight.

«However, neither the military nor the parliament was ready to approve their mobilization at that time. During the public debate surrounding the changes to the mobilization law, which has been ongoing since the end of last year, the situation has changed,» the deputy minister explained.

She also commented on the words of People's Deputy Oleksandr Bakumov, who announced that the number of prisoners in Ukraine who are potentially subject to mobilization is 20,000. Olena Vysotska noted that when the Ministry of Justice was preparing the specified statistics for people's deputies, they immediately rejected about four thousand convicts diagnosed with socially dangerous diseases such as HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. However, the obstacle may not be so much a «bouquet» of diseases as the convict's lack of desire to go to war.

We will remind you that a draft law was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, which proposes to allow prisoners to be released from serving their sentences in case of military service.

The spokesman of the Ministry of Defense, Dmytro Lazutkin, said that convicted Ukrainians who will be mobilized into the army will serve in special units. However, the decision on mobilization will depend not only on the composition of the crime and the conclusion of the VLK.