Administrative Responsibility for Public Actions Aimed to Discredit the Use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation
Geopolitical processes have a significant impact on the stability of the functioning of any state. The Russian Federation, in the context of the conflict with Ukraine and the conduct of a special military operation in the Donbass, faced a large-scale development of illegal behavior, the basis of which is the misinformation of the population and information manipulation by foreign states. In this context, innovations in terms of regulating administrative and criminal liability for public actions, which are aimed directly at discrediting the process of using the Russian Armed Forces, are important. These innovations are unique and Russian legislation did not contain such norms before. In addition, despite the relatively recent introduction of the relevant norms, by now there is already a very extensive practice of bringing to administrative responsibility for the above-mentioned offense. The purpose of writing the presented work is a comprehensive analysis of administrative responsibility for public actions aimed at discrediting the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The author comes to the conclusion about the timeliness of the introduction of administrative responsibility in the above area in the context of emerging challenges and threats to public order and security, as well as the stability of the functioning of the Russian state as a whole. Attention is focused on the fact that the current practice of bringing to responsibility under Art. 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation is very ambiguous, since, on the one hand, many private actions can indeed be qualified according to the above administrative legal norm, on the other hand, at the moment there are no clarifications from the competent authorities on the specifics of bringing to responsibility for these offenses, which in the future may lead to arbitrariness on the part of law enforcement agencies. In this context, it seems very promising to develop appropriate methodological recommendations in order to exclude unreasonable restrictions on human rights and freedoms.