RESPONSIBILITY OF MILITARY OFFICERS FOR THE ATTEMPTED OR ILLEGAL CROSSING OF THE STATE BORDER UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF MARTIAL STATE: ADMINISTRATIVE AND LEGAL ASPECT

Introduction. The issue of bringing servicemen to justice in the context of the ongoing armed aggression of the Russian Federation is gaining special public resonance. The issue of strengthening legal responsibility was hotly discussed at the end of 2022 [17], as well as in July 2023 [18], when changes were made to the legislation on the status of military personnel. However, according to the authors, such changes did not take into account the peculiarities of law enforcement practice, were non-systematic in nature and strengthened the discretionary powers of military commanders (supervisors) to make decisions regarding the qualification of actions of subordinates at their own discretion, including regarding administrative offenses. The issue of distinguishing an administrative offense of military personnel from a disciplinary offense also remains not fully resolved and, as a result, in some cases causes the leveling of the principle of inevitability of just punishment for the commission of offenses by military personnel. Although military personnel are not exempted from administrative liability, there is no specific procedure for bringing military personnel to administrative liability under Article 204–1 of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses (hereinafter referred to as the Code of Administrative Offenses). Purpose. The purpose of the study is to generalize and analyze the grounds and procedures for prosecuting servicemen for attempting or illegally crossing the state border under martial law, identifying the problems of prosecuting them during martial law, and identifying the most appropriate ways to solve them. Disclosure of the problems of proceedings in administrative offense cases. Materials and methods. The research materials are: 1) regulatory and legal regulation of relations of administrative, disciplinary and criminal liability; 2) the works of domestic and foreign authors conducting their scientific and practical research on the issues of bringing servicemen to legal responsibility, in particular during martial law. In the process of carrying out the research, the following scientific methods were used: systemic and structural (for the analysis of disciplinary, administrative and criminal liability of military personnel); historical and legal (in the process of revealing the current state of legislation); formal-logical (in order to characterize the priorities in solving issues of insufficient level of legal regulation of the onset of administrative responsibility of military personnel under Article 204–1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses); comparativist (to identify the significance for the qualification of the actions of military personnel of the legal regime of martial law as opposed to a special period); modeling (in formulating conclusions); logical-normative (for the analysis of legislative and normative-legal acts on the peculiarities of the onset of administrative, disciplinary and criminal liability of military personnel during the operation of the martial law regime); statistical method (for analysis of data on the number of offenses related to attempted or illegal crossing of the state border by military personnel).