Criminal Offences Against the Fundamentals of Ukraine’s National Security under Martial Law: Problematic Issues of Forensic Support for Pre-Trial Investigation

The article addresses criminal offences against the fundamentals of Ukraine’s national security under martial law and examines problematic issues of forensic support for their pre-trial investigation. It is substantiated that the “hybridization” of threats, the dispersion of events and actors, and the predominance of digital communications and transnational channels create heightened risks of loss of evidence, defects in procedural formalization, and the subsequent inadmissibility of the evidentiary corpus. Within the general criminal-law characterization, the focus is placed on qualification “bottlenecks” that directly determine the subject matter of proof (conflict of legal norms, delimitation of related offences, proving the direction of intent and role-based participation in network configurations). The study systematizes problems of forensic support at the initial stage of proceedings (primary recording of the event and digital traces), in digital evidence (source, method of acquisition, integrity, reproducibility), in the legalization of materials obtained through operational-search activities and covert investigative (search) actions (procedural prospectivity of results, completeness of documentation, risks of “procedural gaps”), in the use of tactical operations and temporary access to items and documents, as well as in the domain of judicial control, admissibility of evidence, and the standard of substantiation of procedural decisions. A generalizing model of forensic support (detection–fixation–procedural formalization– verification–judicial control) and a set of applied solutions are proposed: an algorithm for primary actions aimed at minimizing “evidentiary gaps,” protocols for digital documentation (metadata recording, integrity control, description of the acquisition environment, chain of custody), criteria of necessity/proportionality for digital intrusions and standards for substantiating motions, as well as organizational standards for interaction between investigators and operational units and prosecutorial oversight of the evidentiary fitness of results. It is demonstrated that the decisive quality criteria of forensic support under martial law should be the verifiability, reproducibility, and admissibility of evidence, provided that human rights guarantees are preserved. Prospects for further research are outlined, including the development of specialized investigative methodologies for specific groups of security-related offences and the unification of approaches to assessing digital and covertly obtained evidence in judicial practice.