The normative regulation of criminal liability for high treason has become much more complicated since the beginning of the active phase of Russian aggression against Ukraine. The Criminal Code of Ukraine has been amended by new criminal law norms, which, expectedly, have entered into systemic relations with the already existing prohibitions, creating quite serious both theoretical and practical problems associated with their application. This necessitates a scientific audit of the system of norms and provisions that reflect the criminal-law variations of high treason in the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The purpose of this article is to change the perspective of the analysis of the state of criminal-law regulation of liability for high treason, to determine the adequacy ofreflecting its variations in the current Criminal Code of Ukraine, their correlation with each other and to outline possible directions for improvement of such regulation. The most abstract form of high treason, which covers essentially all other types of such criminally punishable behavior, is assistance in subversive activities against Ukraine provided to a foreign state, a foreign organization or their representatives. The legal meaning of the feature “under martial law”, that is specified in Part 2 of Art. 111 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, is twofold: it can act as a feature that qualifies the encroachment provided for in Part 1 of the same Article, and it also acts as a constitutive feature of such a form of high treason as joining the enemy. In other words, joining the enemy under martial law, even without a period of armed conflict, should entail criminal liability under Part 2 of Art. 111 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The main flaw in the legislative solution to the problem of criminal liability for collaboration is, it seems, a conceptual approach, according to which the concept of this phenomenon is reflected in the criminal law by establishing criminal liability for various forms of relevant behavior in the absence of a generic notion that would determine the necessary essential features of this phenomenon as a whole. In the current situation, before making changes to the Criminal Code of Ukraine and introducing a demarcation feature that will make it possible to distinguish different variations of high treason, we can try using a so-called contextual element. In our case, the content of such a contextual element should be the context of the occupation: collaboration, unlike other variations of high treason, is carried out only in this context – under occupation.

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Journal articles

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Theses

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Newspaper articles

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Websites

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