ON THE GROUNDS OF CRIMINALIZATION OF ACTIONS, PROVIDED BY ART. 114-2 OF THE CRIMINAL CODE OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The article is devoted to a critical analysis of the decision of the national parliamentarians to add a new article to the Criminal Code of Ukraine 114-2 and is aimed at obtaining a scientifically based answer to the question of whether there were grounds for the criminalization of the acts described therein, and if so, which ones. In particular, based on the results of writing the article, it is concluded that, firstly, the establishment in 2022 of criminal liability for the unauthorized dissemination of militarily significant information had a strong social basis and was caused by a number of reasons at once, the main of which, of course, was a significant and the sudden change in the social situation in our country, which was the result of Russia’s large-scale and open attack on Ukraine; secondly, being the main reason for the criminalization of the act under investigation, the corresponding aggression of the Russian Federation simultaneously played the role of a catalyst for the emergence of a number of other interdependent processes, the development of which put on the agenda the question of the objective necessity of introducing criminal liability for the relevant acts, namely, unfavorable the dynamics of the unauthorized dissemination of militarily significant information, a change in the perception of the degree of public danger and the generally recognized moral assessment of this act; thirdly, one of the important reasons for the criminalization of the investigated behavior was the significant development of a new group of social relations that took place on the basis of economic or technical progress - informational relations. The same fact that, despite the ongoing war since 2014, the issue of criminalization of the behavior described in Art. 114-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, became the agenda only in 2022 is explained by the fact that: a) until 2022, the war with the Russian Federation was not of a large-scale nature; b) starting from the end of 2015, the intensity of hostilities in Donbas decreased significantly.