Donetsk and criminals
Briefly on the subject of the topic that floated lately with the requests of prisoners to let them fight for the DPR.
It must be said that there's nothing new here. Already in April, when military action was just starting, the officer on duty received a curious call in the following sense. "Hello. I am a highly authoritative person in our prison. Both prisoners and the guard here are for the DPR, do you know when there will be amnesty, so that all of us would go fight for the new power."
There was no amnesty before the referendum or after. While the war was going on, the prisons lived their usual life and lately floated in the media space, when several inmates ran away from prison in Donetsk after a shell hit, and those who stayed again raised the topic of "let us fight".
The DPR authorities said that in principle they aren't against it, but only for those who didn't commit serious crimes.
Overall, the practice of using criminals in the first line units does not offer much perspectives. The use of criminals in the penal battalions of the fascist junta perfectly showed that they are useful only for punitive operations, at the same time they also generate an increase of the number of crimes in the front line zone - burglaries, murders, marauders, and the miscellaneous bouquet of the actions that are traditional for this contingent.
No serious successes in the war effort can be noted behind them.
There are no grounds to suppose that the Donetsk criminals will be anyhow more valuable material for the war.
Certainly, it is possible to gather some kind of a penal company among the people who didn't commit serious crimes, being in which will roll down the term using some accelerated formula, but again all of this requires fairly stringent filtration and military control over such people, with maintaining ruthless discipline, so that the new "fighters for freedom" wouldn't add to the rows of marauders and burglars, which use the war to carry out their dirty business at the expense of the hapless population.
Therefore, if the DPR leadership will go there, then I think that things won't go beyond releasing certain categories of criminals who didn't commit serious crimes.
In military respect this is a fairly dubious idea in any case. However, considering the lack of people, even such unreliable contingent may be useful somewhere.
In any case the decision is behind Zakharchenko and Strelkov.
Original article: http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/1726284.html (in Russian)