Military law and order in Ukraine under a war of attrition: legal liability of servicemembers in domestic and foreign dimensions

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive scholarly-legal analysis of the problems of ensuring military law and order and military discipline under the legal regime of martial law in Ukraine, viewed through the lens of a phenomenon specific to the current phase of the Russian Federation’s armed aggression – a war of attrition that exhausts not only the state’s material and technical potential but also the morale of the nation and the physical and psychological resources of Defence Forces personnel. The notion of military law and order is examined as an object protected by disciplinary, administrative, material, civil and criminal-law measures, along with the correlation between military discipline and the legal liability of servicemembers. The evolution of the normative regulation of servicemembers’ liability in 2014-2026 is traced, from increasing repressiveness of legislation to the introduction of restorative mechanisms for returning to service. Official judicial and prosecutorial statistics are analysed, evidencing an unprecedented rise in military criminal offences – from 2,980 in 2021 to 13,583 in 2022, 18,883 in the first three quarters of 2023, and over 161,000 proceedings under Article 407 of the Criminal Code alone within ten months of 2025, with due reservations regarding the correlational nature of the data and the classification of statistics since December 2025. It is argued that the effectiveness of punitive mechanisms is limited unless the exhaustion factor – combat stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, the absence of a clear demobilisation horizon – is taken into account, and that increased repressiveness of legislation alone does not reduce the level of military crime. Drawing on a comparative-legal analysis of foreign experience (the United Kingdom, the United States, and Israel) regarding the exhaustion factor within military justice systems, a set of measures for improving legal regulation in Ukraine is proposed, combining fair, differentiated liability with psychological reintegration measures, the implementation of combat immunity principles, and an outline structure for codifying Chapter XIX of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.