STRATEGY FOR ELIMINATING CORRUPTION THREATS TO UKRAINE'S NATIONAL SECURITY
Authors: Makarenkov Oleksii 
Published: April 2024

The article reveals the strategy for elimination of corruption threats to national security. It is a system of knowledge about legal and organisational measures aimed at ensuring the supremacy of human virtues in public-legal relations at a level that excludes both potential and real threats to human rights, territorial integrity, safe living conditions of citizens and other constitutional values. It is a molar set, the content capacity of which is divided into at least two atomic units – legal norms and the implementation of legal norms. Taken together, both components of the strategy are capable of ensuring the preservation of these values and the development of the nation on this basis on an ongoing basis. The first component is intended to cover the content of legal relations. The second component involves the practical implementation of legal norms. These two variables equally saturate the functional and structural content of the security of national interests. Accordingly, the security of the nation exists only under the condition of the implementation of law-making and law-enforcement operations, which is possible only at the level of the institutionalisation of these processes. Any replacement of an institution by a person, of public interest by private interest, of law by its visibility, of freedom by force, determines the operational and/or strategic dysfunction of law, which leads to the loss of meaningful national values. It is determined that the hierarchy of initial relations of key concepts for understanding corruption distortions, the essential content of national interests and the relationship of corruption acts with the level of threats to Ukraine's national security form the ontological basis of the strategy for eliminating such threats. This basis should also include the principles of its creation, updating, implementation and monitoring of effectiveness. This is the introductory part of the strategy. In the substantive part of the strategy, it is necessary to specify the goal, tasks and areas of national interests, as well as the subjects of its implementation, effectiveness control and renewal. These subjects include all public authorities, civil organisations and each citizen. The main responsibility for the effectiveness of this approach lies not only with specialised anti-corruption bodies, but necessarily with all national public authorities. It is emphasised that there will be a system of control over such performers within the already existing infrastructure of public authorities and with detailed rules on the limits of control by citizens, the legal possibilities of which should be wide enough to ensure that this control remains an effective tool for ensuring the provisions of the specified strategy, including the possibility for citizens to use legal procedures of vigilantism. Separate sections of this strategy should be devoted to detailed rules for strengthening national security through transnational connections and digital technological resources. The secret part of the strategy should contain rules for using the nation's permanent and situational advantages, its individual features and other resources at a particular moment in time, as well as in the short, medium and long term. This part should also reflect the algorithms for determining the nature and qualities of these advantages, timely verification of their emergence and transformation. The author establishes that all these rules and algorithms should be combined with the rules for determining the changing nature of corruption acts and corruption subjects and their criminal accomplices.