FEATURES OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE-LEGAL STATUS OF ENTITIES OF THE SECURITY AND DEFENSE SECTOR OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The article clarifies the substantive content and distinguishing features of 
the administrative and legal status of entities within Ukraine’s security and 
defense sector. It first situates those entities as members of an institutionally, 
organizationally, and functionally defined circle of subjects of administrative law 
that conduct security activity in the fields of national security and defense under 
democratic civilian control. What unites them is a shared administrative and legal 
status as subjects of national security and (or) defense, a status that, in turn, 
grounds the State’s duty to create appropriate guarantees for their effective performance within public administration. The administrative and legal status of 
these entities is proposed as a special legal construct: a normatively ordered 
complex of structural elements that delineates the specific legal position of 
diverse bodies pursuing a common purpose and set of tasks in the operation of 
Ukraine’s security and defense sector. This construct fixes each entity’s 
institutional place within the system of public administration and demarcates the 
lawful bounds of public-authority intervention in the sphere of ensuring national 
security and defense. Doctrinally, the status is formed primarily by norms of 
administrative law and functions as a sectoral legal status that models the 
regulatory position of the relevant entities. It is anchored in a common object of 
security activity so that heterogeneous, multi-level bodies remain components of 
a single national system and can interact effectively. Teleologically, the status is 
conditioned by the presence of a specific purpose and defined tasks for each 
entity’s activity, the content of which corresponds to the overarching aims and 
objectives of national security and defense. Normatively, it operates as the 
principal legal precondition enabling these entities to enter administrative legal 
relations concerning national security and defense – relations within which state 
coercion, particularly administrative-legal coercion, may lawfully be applied.