Environmental and legal aspects of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine

The article examines the environmental and legal aspects of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. The problems of bringing the aggressor state to responsibility for ecocide are analyzed. Having found a legislative enshrinement in the national criminal law (Article 441 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine), ecocide has not been enshrined in international criminal law. It is not recognized as a crime either in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court or in any other international legal act. As of today, Russian crimes against the environment can be investigated by the International Criminal Court as war crimes. The author of the article supports the proposal regarding the need to include the crime of ecocide in the Rome Statute. The ecological and legal aspect of the formation of an international compensation mechanism is studied, the components of which are: 1) an international register of damages; 2) compensation commission (which will consider individual applications for compensation by the Russian Federation for losses from citizens, companies and the state); 3) compensation fund (which will accumulate funds to pay commission decisions, including at the expense of confiscated Russian assets). The mechanism of compensation for environmental damage caused as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine is analyzed, and ways of its optimization are proposed. The future compensation mechanism should be based on the «ecosystem services approach», which will significantly increase the amount of environmental damage that the Russian Federation will pay to Ukraine. The international practice of compensation for environmental damage caused by the aggressor as a result of military actions and temporary occupation was studied and analyzed. The author emphasized the need to reform the state environmental monitoring system. Without reliable monitoring data, it is difficult to prove a causal relationship between the illegal actions of the aggressor state and the damage caused to the environment.