Annotation: The article provides a theoretical analysis of war crimes in Ukraine during the period of martial law in the context of international humanitarian law. The peculiarities of the presentation of the forms of the objective side of the criminal offense provided for in Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine - violation of the laws and customs of war - were revealed, and a comparative analysis was made with the construction of war crimes and their characteristics in international criminal law. Statistics of cases of national courts for violations of the criminal offense provided for in Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine are provided. In the article, we propose an approach to the consideration of war crimes in the context of the protection of war victims, namely the civilian population.