Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Derecho Público "Dr. Humberto J. La Roche"
de la Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas de la Universidad del Zulia
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Esta publicación cientíca en formato digital es continuidad de la revista impresa
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Vol.40 N° 73
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ISSN 0798- 1406 ~ De pó si to le gal pp 198502ZU132
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Vol. 40, Nº 73 (2022), 655-670
IEPDP-Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas - LUZ
The Criminal Law Aspect
of the Violation of Environmental
Law in the context of armed aggression
against Ukraine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.46398/cuestpol.4073.37
Nataliia Barabash *
Igor Paryzkyi **
Eduard Rasiuk ***
Bohdan Telefanko ****
Oleksii Humin *****
Abstract
The objective of the study was to analyze, in a comparative
legal framework, violations of environmental law in the context
of armed aggression against Ukraine. The research method was a
dialectical combination of the proven general and private scientic
methods of legal knowledge. They emphasize in the Research Results
that scientic advances can be used to solve the serious problems that
arise in the legal regulation of criminal liability for environmental crimes
in the context of armed aggression against Ukraine, as well as in general
processes aimed at improving the environmental situation as a whole. It is
concluded that the problems of criminal liability for environmental crimes
in the context of armed aggression against Ukraine are managed, as far as
doctrine is concerned, in the need to study the problems that currently exist
in this area, in order to develop eective means of combating environmental
crimes. In this regard, the optimization of the solution of environmental
protection problems as a result of aggression against our State is possible
on the basis of inter-State cooperation.
* Doctor of Philosophie Associal Professor at Departement of Sozial Law Ivan Franko National University
of Lwiw, Faculty of Law, Departement of Social Law 14 Sichovykh Striltsiv St., Lviv, 79000, Ukraine.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1520-8985
** Doctor of Science (PHD), Pro-rector Professor of Marketing, Economics, Management and
Administration National Academy of Management, Kyiv, Ukraine. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-
0001-6835-5930
*** Candidate of science of law Associate Professor, Professor Department of Criminology and criminal
enforcement law, National Academy of Internal Aairs 1, Solomianska Square, Kyiv, 03035, Ukraine.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4065-5266
**** Candidate of Legal Sciences, Associate Professor at the Department of Law Lviv National University
of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnologies C. Z. Grzycki, Lviv, st. Pekarska,50 Ukraine. ORCID ID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4682-3622
***** Doctor in Law, Professor Head of the Department of Criminal Law and Procedure of the Educational
and Scientic Institute of Law, Psychology and Innovative Education, Lviv Polytechnic National
University, Lviv, Ukraine. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8016-945X
656
Nataliia Barabash, Igor Paryzkyi, Eduard Rasiuk, Bohdan Telefanko y Oleksii Humin
The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine
Keywords: environmental threats; environmental law; environmental
crime; armed conict; criminal law in armed conicts.
El aspecto penal de la violación del derecho ambiental
en el contexto de la agresión armada contra Ucrania
Resumen
El objetivo del estudio fue analizar, en un marco jurídico comparativo,
las violaciones del derecho ambiental en el contexto de la agresión armada
contra Ucrania. El método de investigación fue una combinación dialéctica
de los métodos cientícos generales y privados probados del conocimiento
jurídico. Destacan en los Resultados de la investigación que los avances
cientícos pueden utilizarse para resolver los graves problemas que
surgen en la regulación jurídica de la responsabilidad penal por delitos
ambientales en el contexto de la agresión armada contra Ucrania, así como
en los procesos generales destinados a mejorar la situación ambiental en
su conjunto. Se concluye que, los problemas de la responsabilidad penal
por delitos medioambientales en el contexto de la agresión armada contra
Ucrania se gestionan, en lo concerniente a la doctrina, en la necesidad de
estudiar los problemas que existen actualmente en este ámbito, con el n de
desarrollar medios ecaces de lucha contra los delitos medioambientales. En
este sentido, la optimización de la solución de los problemas de protección
del medio ambiente como resultado de la agresión contra nuestro Estado es
posible sobre la base de la cooperación interestatal.
Palabras clave: amenazas ambientales; derecho ambiental; delito
ambiental; conicto armado; derecho penal en
conictos armados.
Introduction
The focus of criminology on crimes and harms committed by and against
humans has broadened over time (Brisman and South, 2019).
Normal human activities and their interaction with nature can be
disrupted in times of war. As is known, any military conict is determined
by the initial stage of its origin and the nal drawing up of the normative-
legal basis of the process of regulating the consequences of the conict.
In most wars of the 19th and 20th centuries the main cause of military
conicts was natural resources: oil, coal, gas, timber, diamonds, etc. Almost
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Vol. 40 Nº 73 (2022): 655-670
all large-scale wars had environmental consequences. An eective way to
undermine the economic potential of the enemy and reduce his ghting
ability was to inuence elements of the biosphere or technogenic objects in
the course of military operations. As a consequence of the above, therefore,
we can armatively say that environmental oenses are an inherent feature
of war.
Practice shows that technical, political, economic, national, and other
conicts can lead to negative environmental consequences. For example,
military actions, blockades of communication routes, and other forms of
conicts related to the adoption of decisions that cause environmental
damage due to the direct destruction of environmental objects. At the same
time, inter-ethnic and other conicts distract from solving a number of
traditional environmental problems.
The authors analyzed the criminal law norms that enshrine responsibility
for environmental crimes in Ukraine in the context of armed aggression
against our state, as well as the analysis of criminal legislation and problems
of implementation of criminal responsibility for environmental crimes in
foreign countries.
1. Theoretical Framework or Literature Review
It should be noted the fact that so far there is no legal and academic
research in the eld of environmental law of Ukraine regarding violations
resulting from armed aggression against Ukraine. That is why in the sphere
of scientic interest there is a question of how the Ukrainian legislation
will solve the problems of preventing environmental crimes for the future
to protect the environment, as foreign experience could be used for the
development of domestic criminal legislation aimed at protecting the
environment.
The relevance of this study, given that the leadership of our state is
interested in the problems of protecting and improving the environment
arising from the ongoing armed aggression against Ukraine, and as a result
of which the people of Ukraine suer seriously, violates their fundamental
rights, including, and ecological.
An analysis of scholarly works on violations of environmental law during
armed conicts reveals a clear link between armed aggression against a state
and violations of environmental law. For example, Nixon (2018) examines
the consequences of environmental law violations and environmental
oenses themselves stemming from the Vietnam War, while Cusato (2018)
has chosen the same subject of study, but in another country, Kuwait, after
the end of that country’s war.
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The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine
As for the relationship of political aspects and environmental law, for
this reason, the very concept of environmental security Kornieiev and
Melnyk, (2021) as stated by the authors includes a set of measures to ensure
a certain state of the natural object and state guarantees to ensure the safe
operation of human life.
Undoubtedly, a relevant and signicant factor of objective nature is
the practical impossibility of receiving and registering information about
environmental crimes from the territories not controlled by the Ukrainian
authorities (the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and certain territories of
Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts).
We note that members of the public, in particular, the International
Charitable Organization “Ecology-Law-Human”, make attempts to study
the consequences of the war in eastern Ukraine on the environment and
public health. However, we agree with the fair comments of Turlova (2017),
it does not aect the registration in the established procedural order of
environmental encroachments in the specied territories. Consequently,
the issue of criminal liability in the scientic circle of domestic scientists
remains little researched.
2. Methodology
The methodological basis of the study of the criminal-legal aspect of the
violation of environmental law in the context of armed aggression against
Ukraine was tested by general scientic and private methods of scientic
knowledge, in particular, the dialectical method, methods of formal logic
– analysis, and synthesis, comparison, description, classication, methods
of induction and deduction, systems, comparative legal and formal-legal
methods.
3. Results
Provision of criminal liability for environmental oenses and attribution
of their environmental consequences in the context of armed aggression
against Ukraine is due to such reasons as:
1. The ecological nature of the act. If we analyze military practice, it is
possible to separate a special distinctive tendency - the environment
is considered as a direct object of military inuence, changing
the goals and character of modern war (military conicts). The
distinction of the environmental component of oenses committed
during military conicts from others is that the implementation
of specially designed programs (operations) with the purpose
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of total destruction or local destruction of the ecological system
in the territory of the enemy for the maximum facilitation of the
implementation of strategic or operational-tactical tasks.
2. The global nature of the manifestation. The consequences of
environmental oenses during armed conicts are extremely severe
and may aect the interests of several states.
3. The consequence of violations of environmental law during armed
conicts is an environmental disaster that threatens human
existence. Environmental catastrophe is usually understood as
natural disasters or disasters caused by processes of human activity,
which have a long-term (often irreversible) negative eect on the
environment and human beings, spreading over a fairly large
territory.
4. It is always an intentional act. Methods of waging environmental
warfare can be: the physical extermination of fauna and ora, the
destruction of the environment by various agents of biological,
chemical, or physical nature, provoking a man-made disaster
through the destruction of environmentally dangerous objects, the
impact on the biosphere (its elements), the occurrence of natural
disasters have a certain focus. Assessment of the methods of warfare
is determined by the possibility and availability of methods of
destruction and the tactics of their application.
Environmental oenses in a military conict are those that are used not
only by means specically designed to destroy the environment but also
through the use of weapons systems that originally had a dierent intended
purpose (weapons of mass destruction, conventional weapons, non-lethal
weapons, etc.).
The use of military means is complex, which increases the eectiveness
of their defeat on the environment. As an example, we can mention the fact
that the use of the “Grad” system (eld 122-mm multiple rocket launcher
BM-21) for ring in an armed conict leads to the release of hazardous
chemical substances - raw materials, semi-products of weapons, which
leads to an excess of their concentration in the atmosphere to a level which
may be equivalent to the use of chemical weapons.
Disasters of special danger usually occur as a result of ecological wars (or
as a consequence of military conicts with ecological consequences), and
terrorist acts with ecological consequences (ecological terrorism). Even the
limited use of special means or military equipment against environmentally
dangerous technical facilities or components of the biosphere can lead to
the inevitable destruction of the environment over a large area.
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The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine
It should be noted that the appearance in the Criminal Code of Ukraine
of a special chapter providing for criminal responsibility for environmental
crimes should be considered as an important advanced achievement of legal
science in the eld of improving the criminal regulation of environmental
protection and strengthening criminal liability for damage caused to the
natural environment.
However, theoretically, the problem of criminal responsibility for
environmental crimes in Ukraine in the context of armed aggression against
Ukraine has not been given enough attention, despite the crisis state of the
environment in the country during martial law. Criminal protection of the
environment in Ukraine is characterized by the extreme imperfection of
criminal legal norms, gaps in criminal legislation, and soft sanctions for
illegal actions in the environmental sphere.
This is reected in the fact that the Criminal Code of Ukraine uses the
model of an indirect way of protection for environmental elements, based
on the fact that the criminal protection is primarily subject to the ownership
of environmental objects, rather than the objects themselves directly.
It can be concluded that the environmental oense in the context
of armed aggression against Ukraine is a guilty and socially dangerous
act or omission enshrined in the criminal law that encroaches on the
environmental order and safety of the population and territories of natural
resource use in Ukraine, and consists in direct illegal use or impact on
natural objects that serve as the public property of the Ukrainian people
(Denysyuk et al., 2021).
Regarding the denition of the object and objective aspect of
environmental crime in the legislation of Ukraine, the latter allows stating
that as the object of environmental crimes in the criminal law acts the totality
of social relations, ensuring the protection of the natural environment and
environmental safety of society, and the list of direct criminal oenses
and objects of environmental crimes can include the environment in
general and its individual components. The determining specicity of the
objective side of environmental crimes, as well as the way of committing an
environmental crime, is an increase in the degree of public danger of this
group of criminal acts.
Latency of environmental crime due to the objective aspect of the
act is a complex problem, its solution requires the eorts of not only law
enforcement, but also the legislative bodies of Ukraine.
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4. Discussion
Human societies are fundamentally linked to global environmental
systems and are transforming ecological conditions in dramatic ways, such
that the current epoch has been termed the Anthropocene (Lengefeld,
2020). The environmental damage or pollution also threatens the rights of
future generations to enjoy a clean and healthy environment as an impact
of the principle of ubiquity (Ali, 2020). Ecology has a direct, though not
the main, inuence on the development of forms and methods of armed
struggle, and on the nature of warfare.
Active inuence on natural processes makes it possible to create simple
and economically destructive means that produce results that leave other
weapons of mass destruction far behind. Environmentally destructive
practices continue to disproportionately aect the poor and disenfranchised
as well as more-than-human spaces and lives (Forsyth et al., 2021).
In addition, natural conditions can be inuenced remotely, at a
considerable distance from the place at which the “strike” is directed, which
creates favorable opportunities for covert warfare. Unlike traditional crimes,
environmental crimes (and environmental harms) frequently have long-
lasting and irreversible eects (Nurse, 2020). It is for this reason that many
of the world’s democracies have criminalized violations of environmental
law in their legislation.
Over the past four decades, criminal, as opposed to civil or administrative,
prosecutions have assumed an increasingly visible role in US environmental
law enforcement (Johnson et al., 2020). At the same time, as practice shows,
сritics of existing systems of justice and regulation have long pointed to the
failures of these systems to protect the environment, prevent environmental
crimes, and prosecute environmental oenders (White, 2018).
The peculiarity of the institute of environmental norms of criminal law
should be dened as its complexity since the system of legal responsibility
includes not only criminal but also administrative, land, forest, water, and
environmental law norms. At the present stage, the criminal law to combat
environmental crimes has undergone signicant changes, especially taking
into account the ongoing armed aggression against Ukraine.
In society and at the legislative level there should be a dierent approach
to the legal assessment of environmental crimes. Environmental crime
refers to the violation of laws intended to protect the environment and
human health (Dagras, 2021). Priority should be given not to economic
interests concerning material damage caused as a result of armed aggression
against Ukraine, but to the restoration and protection of the environmental
interests of the Ukrainian people, conditions that are favorable for human
life and health.
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Nataliia Barabash, Igor Paryzkyi, Eduard Rasiuk, Bohdan Telefanko y Oleksii Humin
The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine
In environmental protection it is important to implement the following
basic principles: ensuring an environmentally safe environment, the
formation of a human ecological worldview, and the priority of environmental
safety requirements in all areas of the national economy, which is ahead of
the nature of environmental protection measures, the greening of material
production, the mandatory environmental expertise, the combination of
incentives and responsibilities in environmental protection, etc.
Environmental Protection Agencies (EPAs) have been involved in citizen
science initiatives for decades, engaging with citizens to protect and restore
our environment (Rubio-Iglesias et al., 2020).
The world community has long been aware of the fact that the
environment and its components are the common heritage of mankind.
All state management in the industrialized world faces social demands to
combat problems of environmental pollution and degradation (Steinebach,
2019).
Environmental protection and rational use of its resources is an
important problem of our time, in the solution of which the main
conditions are trust and mutual understanding between states, conducting
a unied environmental policy in their territory, and, most importantly, the
development of environmental legislation.
Inter-state legal responsibility takes into account the legal consequences
for the subject of international law, who has violated its and international
obligations, including in the eld of regulation of environmental relations,
which include, among other conditions, the duty of the violating state to
compensate the damage caused to other subjects of international law, and
in some cases to their natural and legal persons.
Issues of international legal responsibility are reected in the UN
Charter, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and other documents.
Currently, there are more than 200 bilateral and multilateral treaties in
the eld of environmental protection. The current (once) international law
of state responsibility is shaped by the International Law Commission’s
Articles on the Responsibility of States for internationally wrongful acts,
generally endorsed in state and judicial practice as consonant with custom
(Paparinskis, 2020).
In 2020, the Stop Ecocide campaign convened a panel of experts, tasked
with drafting a denition of ecocide capable of being incorporated into the
International Criminal Court’s mandate (Doran et al., 2021). Only through
the joint eorts of the global community can we overcome the consequences
of environmental violations. Examples are open knowledge-sharing
platforms, joint procurement of recycled materials, technical standards on
the environmental performance of products or processes, and many others
(De Stefano, 2020).
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In the long human society, people’s awareness of environmental
protection has experienced from scratch, distinguished process (Tan et al.,
2018). The consequences of environmental crimes are especially noticeable
during wars. The consequences of military conicts on the environment can
be obvious: the destruction of industrial facilities, environmental warfare,
and indirectly. “Widespread environmental” can be dened as the war
that took place in Vietnam. A variety of chemicals were used in the war.
Forests and crops were destroyed by napalm over a huge area. Herbicides
and defoliants destroyed vegetation on 360 thousand hectares of cultivated
land and aected more than 40% of the areas under crops.
The Vietnam War resulted in large areas of increased soil erosion and
acidity, and some plant species and useful microorganisms living in the
soil disappeared without a trace. Only 18 out of 150 bird species survived,
amphibians and insects were almost completely destroyed, and many
species of sh in the rivers. Vietnam was a union of predicament, reection,
and conict (Nixon, 2018). These are the ecological consequences of this
war.
The Iraqi war against Kuwait in 1990-to to 1991 also had grave
environmental consequences, even though there was no deliberate use of
environmental weapons in this armed conict. The ecological consequences
were lakes of oil, sites of extinguished res, bird corpses on the coast, and
yellowed mango thickets adorning the coastal tropical zone. Scientists note
that the clouds of smoke and soot that swept over southern Asia may have
aected the rainy seasons and signicantly reduced harvests.
The latter circumstance is a sign of environmental warfare. Through
an examination of the practice of the UNCC, the overarching purpose of
this paper is to draw attention to some problematic dimensions of the
compensation regime for the environmental impact of the 1990–91 Gulf
War, and thus raise questions on its capacity to inuence future responses
to environmental damage in the context of contemporary armed conicts
(Cusato, 2018). It should also be noted that military conicts lead to a
decrease in population in a particular region, which cannot but aect the
environment.
Environmental criminal law provides for measures targeting the
most serious environmental oenses and improving the enforceability of
environmental provisions (Solodov and Zębek, 2020). Consequences of
violations of environmental law in the context of armed aggression against
Ukraine are dicult to predict, but it is possible to provide for responsibility
for them, in particular criminal responsibility.
Thus, Section VIII of the Criminal Code of Ukraine provides the basis
of criminal liability for environmental violations, which species the main
points of combating crimes against the environment and lists the most
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The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine
dangerous criminal oenses in the eld of environmental security (Criminal
Code of Ukraine, 2001).
As to the violations of environmental law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine, in accordance with this section of the
Criminal Code, they are: violations of the rules of environmental security,
pollution or damage of land, pollution of atmospheric air, destruction or
damage to objects of the ora (Criminal Code of Ukraine, 2001). Article
68 of the Law of Ukraine “On Environmental Protection” points out that
violation of Ukrainian legislation on environmental protection leads to
disciplinary, administrative, civil, and criminal liability (Law of Ukraine on
Environmental Protection, 1991).
It should also be noted that in the Resolution of the Plenum of the
Supreme Court of Ukraine “On judicial practice on cases of crimes and
other oenses against the environment” the generic object is dened as “the
constitutionally guaranteed right of citizens to a safe environment, as well as
public relations in the sphere of protection and reproduction of the natural
environment, rational use of natural resources, ensuring environmental
safety of human life” (Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of
Ukraine, 2010).
Due to globalization and advanced technology, negative environmental
consequences resulting from industrial and commercial operations
worldwide (Al Agba, 2018). The current ecological situation in Ukraine
has extremely negative parameters (Ladychenko et al., 2019). Ukraine is
characterized by a high concentration of industrial potential, the basis of
which is the coal mining, metallurgical, chemical, agricultural industry,
machine-building, and energy.
Over a long period of operation of these facilities, a large amount of
industrial waste with a high content of toxic and poisonous substances has
accumulated and stored in dumps, sumps, and tailings dumps. Combined
with the high population density and developed infrastructure, these factors
create additional risks for Ukraine regarding violations of environmental
law on its territory during an armed conict.
In the context of armed aggression against Ukraine, the issue of
nuclear safety is relevant for our country. The denition of “nuclear safety”
is contained in Article 1 of the Law of Ukraine “On Nuclear Energy Use
and Radiation Safety” as compliance with norms, rules, standards, and
conditions of nuclear materials use ensuring radiation safety, as well
as compliance with acceptable limits of radiation impact on personnel,
population and natural environment established by safety norms, rules and
standards (Law of Ukraine on Nuclear Energy Use and Radiation Safety,
1995).
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According to Article 3 of the Law of Ukraine On Nuclear Energy Use
and Radiation Safety, one of the main tasks of nuclear legislation is to
dene the basic principles of radiation protection of people and the natural
environment, and one of the basic functions of the state administration
body in the eld of nuclear energy use and radiation safety (Law of Ukraine
On Nuclear Energy Use and Radiation Safety, 1995) is to implement the
Nationwide Targeted Environmental Program for Radioactive Waste
Management (Basic Principles (Strategy) of the State Environmental Policy
of Ukraine for the Period up to 2030, 2019).
The countries, in which the technology of active inuence on the
environment for military purposes is suciently developed, can carry out a
policy of “ecological blackmail” against the states that do not develop such
technologies, and also do not create funds for control and counteraction to
environmental violations. An example of such blackmail is the aggression
against Ukraine, namely the seizure of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant
and threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons on the territory of our
state.
From its very beginnings, transnational law has engaged with the
categories of ‘global’, ‘local’, and ‘territory’— the very concepts which are
challenged by Anthropocene realities (Webster and Mai, 2020). There are
many ways to count green crimes at the local, national, and international
levels (Lynch, 2019).
Environmental crimes in the context of armed aggression against
Ukraine, exist on three levels, in particular, in our opinion, are: cruel
treatment of animals, destruction of historical and cultural monuments -
environmental crimes against public health and public morals (national, local
level) ), violation of safety rules at nuclear energy facilities and at explosive
facilities - environmental crimes against public safety (international level),
ecocide - environmental crime Only a small number of the cited examples
allow us to assert the global nature of the danger of environmental crimes
committed in the context of armed aggression against Ukraine since they
involve signicant harm to human life and health and the environment.
It is obvious that in today’s world there are already ways of activities
aecting the environment with a military purpose, and that the consequences
of any armed conict are the commission of environmental oenses. Such
methods are, for example, destruction of the ozone layer, scattering and
formation of clouds and clouds, initiation of earthquakes, creation of tidal
waves, like tsunamis, inuence on tropical cyclones, and use of atmospheric
currents to transfer radioactive and other substances.
As an example, blackmail of one state against another during an
armed conict regarding the possibility to use nuclear weapons or the
threat to destroy a nuclear power plant, as is the case in the context of
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The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the context of armed
aggression against Ukraine
armed aggression against Ukraine. The Nuclear Treaty underlies grave
implications for an environment that may ensue from the use or testing
of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices (Upadlahyay, 2017).
It is clear that each of these methods poses a danger not only to the
participants of the armed conict, but also to other states, so it is important
to make appropriate changes to the Criminal Code of Ukraine with criminal
liability for these threats or use of nuclear weapons.
The national natural resources of Ukraine need special criminal law
protection. Thirty years of human rights refer to a set of generations that
directly or indirectly aects all human beings and future generations (Beigi,
2019). Accordingly, the environmental damage caused by violations of
environmental law due to armed aggression against Ukraine remains an
important issue in the development of questions of responsibility in the
eld of environmental protection in Ukraine.
Restorative justice is a process whereby all the parties with a stake
in a particular oense come to voluntarily to collectively resolve how to
deal with the aftermath of the oense and its implications for the future
(Wijdekop, 2019; (Babanina et al., 2021) Legislating criminal liability for
environmental oenses in the context of armed aggression against our state
in domestic law is necessary. In summary, it is clear that the nation has
reached a point at which decisions about the way forward in environmental
protection need to be made (Olden, 2018).
Conclusions
Based on our research, we can conclude that the main violations of
environmental law in the context of armed aggression against Ukraine are:
1. Purposeful technogenic inuence by “non-military” means on
certain areas of the biosphere, which will inevitably cause natural
disasters on the territory of our state in the future, weather and
climate changes, ozone holes, destruction of ecosystems, violation
of mental and physical health of the population of Ukraine.
2. Purposeful inuence on the natural environment to create
unfavorable conditions for human life: the destruction of the
environment, the enemy, equipment, and weapons, undermining
the economic potential of Ukraine, and psychological and physical
pressure on the enemy.
3. Causing harm to the enemy by aecting his environment: pollution
or contamination of air, water, soil, destruction of ora and fauna.
Violations of environmental law in the context of armed aggression
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against Ukraine can be considered as a set of actions, or measures taken
by the enemy over a long period, with a certain intensity of armed conict,
the parties to which as the main (or primary) means use destruction
(signicant destruction) of the environment, the consequence of which may
be an environmental disaster.
Analysis of criminal legislation indicates that, rstly, there are still
legal gaps in the regulation of the studied public relations, which requires
early elimination. Secondly, at the moment, crimes in the eld of nature
protection in the context of armed aggression against Ukraine, although
they do not represent an increased public danger, environmental damage
is much more serious than property damage since its consequences are
inevitable.
The above indicates the relevance, importance, and timeliness of the
chosen topic of the study on the nature of environmental crimes, causes,
and conditions of their commission, as well as the need to develop a system
of preventive measures in the area under study.
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Vol.40 Nº 73
