Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The Russian Federation, with its plans to regain influence over former Soviet bloc countries, currently constitutes the main military danger for the EU and NATO. Because the war is so close to the EU’s borders, European allies have every reason to increase army financing instead of fuelling a transatlantic disagreement about burden sharing. This article deals with the question of whether the high strategic threat posed by Russia has increased military spending among European allies and decreased free-riding practices after 2014. To analyse this problem, we applied Spearman’s Rank Correlation test and then made a comparative analysis of 21 countries that are both EU and NATO members. Our results confirmed that European allies did not react in the same way to the Russian threat. We proved that strategic factors played a key role in the majority of Eastern European members of NATO, but not across Western European allies.

The article shows that global climate changes are already visible in Ukraine. At the same time the climatic consequences that Ukraine will face will not be so critical for population incubation, as, for example, in Africa and East Asia. In these regions, the catastrophic decline in drinking water and fertile land will stimulate migration to new territories for survival. Climate refugees, according to the authors, will become one of the main challenges to the national and food security of Ukraine and the European region.

As a result of the conducted study, there has been solved an important scientific problem of development of theoretical and methodological foundations of building international competitiveness in the conditions of globalization of innovation activity and creation of organizational and economic tools for support of national innovation system safety in global scientific and technological space. It has been established that innovation activity in Poland is characterized by structural deformation, institutional incompleteness, inconsistency and imbalance of technological, economic, social and value aspects, as a result of which innovation processes in the country have not gained sufficient scale and are not a significant factor of GDP growth. Problems of development of national innovation systems in Poland are caused, first of all, by an unsatisfactory state of financing of the scientific sphere, as a result of which the country has lost the system capable to effectively concentrate resources on priority strategic directions of innovation development. Based on a comparative economic and mathematical analysis of the impact of variables that determine the degree of inclusion of the country in global value chains, as well as diagnostics of the competitive environment of some countries, it has been stated that, except for IT, today Poland has no competitive advantages and preconditions for inclusion in global value chains. Considering the importance of the human development index, the Chinese model of innovation development is most acceptable for the country. Considering that in addition to the financial component, one of the main reasons for slowing down innovation activity in Poland is the lack of effective links between government, business and science, there has been justified the need to develop a government innovation policy based on a combination of direct and indirect methods of innovation support. There has been stressed the importance of building a common information and scientific space with Europe, which is possible in the conditions of creation of an open national innovation system.

The purpose of this article is to fulfil a comparative study of national security legislation, as well as the formation of conceptual foundation for its development and the elaboration of proposals for the improvement thereof with regard to Ukraine. The article analyses in comparative aspect the practice of the Republic of Lithuania as one of the European countries. In the context of globalization, the research focuses on international legal systems of both international and regional levels. The comparative legal analysis of the legal measures to maintain national security revealed similarities in theoretical and methodological approaches. In the study, the author’s definition of national security is given; and a typological model of the concept of national security is formed.

The articles analyses the penetration of social media through personal use into daily life and the relation of this phenomenon to national security. A survey of Lithuanian higher-school students aged 18-29 was conducted according to quantitative research methodology. Young people actively use social networks for various purposes (personal, learning, work, recreation). Statistically, each individual, aged 18-29, has personal profiles on four social networking sites, yet most often does not adequately evaluate and link the use of social networks with possible national security threats and risk factors. Less than two-thirds of young people have heard something of possible threats and risk factors; however, the impact of social media on national security is not considered significant. Thus, it seems that young people lack information about real threats presented by social networks to both personal data storage and national security.