Organized crime: current Ukrainian realities and steps to prevent

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this research is to review extreme approaches to understanding organized crime, its components and signs, as well as to highlight those of them that are modern and inherent to it under the conditions of a large-scale Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory. Method. Induction and deduction are applied when forming author's own conclusions; analysis and synthesis of scientific achievements of a number of researchers, the state of regulatory and legal support. System-structural and functional methods were used in the process of conducting this scientific research.The results. The author is convinced that, as of today, in our country, all illegal activity in the conglomerate of organized crime is not properly accounted for, and this fact is in a cause-and-effect relationship with the established fact that a single legislative and/or doctrinal definition of the concept of "organized "crime" does not exist, as well as its exhaustive components and signs. Their list was expanded and modernized through analysis and synthesis.It has been proven that with the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian aggressor on Ukrainian territory, the problems of organized crime changed somewhat and some of its components became more acute, in particular, despite the fact that as of February 2022 there was a certain "slowing down" of its spread and influence, it was established that on today its new networks "bloomed". The "merger" of transnational criminal organizations with international terrorist organizations has been tracked, especially with regard to the activities of Russian organized crime in the war with Ukraine. Scientific novelty. A significant amount of research has been devoted to this problem, but the full-scale invasion of the aggressor country has brought approaches to understanding the declared problem to a new level, when organized crime should be considered through the prism of its institutionalization, fusion with terrorist activities for the benefit of and with the participation of the aggressor country, its spread in the digital spaces for conducting "active military operations" there, etc.Practical significance. It is believed that the results of the research will help to understand not only the scale of modern organized crime, but also individual author's generalizations and conclusions can shed light on how to counteract it.