Between Necessity and Excess: Social Conditionality of the Criminalization of Aggression Justification (Article 4362 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine)

Relevance. In the context of the full-scale armed invasion by the Russian Federation and its prolonged hybrid aggression against Ukraine, the issue of the social conditioning of criminal law prohibitions aimed at countering information aggression acquires particular theoretical and practical significance. Article 436² of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which establishes criminal liability for justifying, recognizing as lawful, denying the Russian Federation's armed aggression against Ukraine, and glorifying its participants, constitutes a relatively recent legislative decision that requires comprehensive scholarly analysis from the perspective of criminal law doctrine. Purpose. The study aims to identify and analyse the combination of factors that served as the driving force behind the criminalization of the relevant acts, as well as to assess whether the legislative decision corresponds to genuine social needs. Methods. The study employs a three-dimensional analysis of the grounds for criminalization — legal-criminological, socio-economic, and socio-psychological — in their interrelation with the principles of criminalization as systemic-legal guidelines for legislative activity. The dialectical method was used to identify the contradiction between social needs and the capabilities of the criminal law tools; general logical methods for forming generalized conclusions; special legal methods for analyzing the disposition and sanctions of Article 436² of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, its conflicts and statistics of judicial practice; as well as systemic and historical approaches to establishing correlations between the deformations of criminalization and the genesis of the information aggression of the Russian Federation. Results. It is established that the social conditioning of criminal liability for acts covered by Article 436² of the Criminal Code of Ukraine is fundamentally differentiated depending on the form of their commission. Criminalization of public forms of relevant acts is socially justified, since they are characterized by a high degree of public danger and the ability to influence mass consciousness. On the other hand, the extension of the criminal law prohibition to non-public forms of behavior has signs of excessive criminalization, since it is not based on sufficient legal and criminological, socio-economic and socio-psychological grounds. Prospects. Further research is associated with developing an optimal legislative model of criminalization that ensures a balance between the effectiveness of countering information aggression and the observance of individual rights and freedoms.