MOSCOW, August 23. /TASS/. Ukrainian convicts drafted into the country's armed forces often refuse to go into combat, Igor Lutsenko, a former member of the Verkhovna Rada, who has joined the military service himself, has said.

"'There are a lot of smart-ass dudes among prisoners, they pretend they want to fight for Motherland. If they come to the area of close combat, they sometimes refuse to go to fight, and then it's a legal dead end, what to do with them," he told the British media resource Inews. He explained that when prisoners wrote applications for mobilization, they had a completely different motivation.

"They have fresh air and relatively good food, and they don't want to participate in war - a win-win situation for them, compared to the prison," the former MP explained.

Earlier, the Ukrainian Justice Ministry said that 3,800 Ukrainian prisoners had been released early and mobilized, while a total of 5,800 prisoners expressed their desire to serve in the army. At the same time, Ukrainian Justice Minister Denys Malyuska said that the Ukrainian authorities expected to enlist about 15,000 men that way.

The law allowing the mobilization of convicts came into force on 17 May. According to the document, only those convicted of crimes against national security or related to terrorism, murder of two or more people, murder committed with particular cruelty or in combination with rape and drunk driving, if it caused the death of several people, will not be subject to mobilization. Also excluded are rapists, pedophiles and those convicted of particularly serious corruption crimes, killers of police officers or military personnel.

Malyuska has long campaigned for the idea of mobilizing prisoners. Initially, he said that it would be possible to mobilize an additional 50,000, but later he lowered his forecasts. The justice minister also explained that the country's authorities had decided to adopt the law on drafting prisoners into the military service because of problems with mobilization and understaffing of army units.