At the July 18 meeting, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (the Ukrainian Parliaement) voted in the second reading and as a whole for draft law No. 11068, which decriminalizes petit larceny in the amount of up to 3 000 hryvnias and replaces responsibility for it with fines.
The MP from the "Voice" party Yaroslav Zheleznyak reported that 243 MPs voted for the document.
Currently, larceny is considered petit if the value of the property at the time of the crime does not exceed 0.2 of the tax-free minimum income of citizens (302.8 hryvnias as of 2024). Since Ukraine is under martial law, petty theft is automatically qualified under Part 4 of Art. 185 of the Criminal Code, which is punishable by 5 to 8 years of imprisonment. This results in the courts being overburdened with cases and people being convicted of stealing, for example, bottles of whiskey.
The authors of the law explain in the note that such punishments are not commensurate with such minor offence. The main scientific and expert department of the parliament in its commentary on the draft law also indicated that the threshold of criminal responsibility is too low, but if adopted, the document will entail changes to a number of articles of the Criminal Code.
As for fines, they are as follows:
- for petit larceny up to 757 hryvnias — from 850 to 1 700 hryvnias;
- for petit larceny from 758 to 3 028 hryvnias — from 1 700 to 5 100 hryvnias;
- for repeated petit larceny — from 8,500 to 17,000 hryvnias.
Now the draft law must be signed by the President of Ukraine.