Environmental security as an object of criminal law protection

The article is devoted to the analysis of the species object of environmental crimes as a unifying element of all crimes included in Ch. 26 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The author focuses on the change in approaches to the definition of the specific object of these crimes in the scientific literature in the light of the adoption of the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation and the Environmental Security Strategy. The conclusion is made about the independence of environmental safety as a kind of national security, which leads to the need to revise the generic object of crimes included in Section IX of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, since the public safety inherent in its name is one of the varieties of national security. Giving environmental safety the status of a generic object will ensure a more consistent implementation of one of the independent tasks of criminal legislation - environmental protection and, as a consequence, the systematization of environmental crimes. Further analysis of environmental safety in the framework of criminal law relations will allow investigating the immediate objects of criminal law protection and determine the criteria for the classification of environmental crimes.