What Article 381 of the Criminal Code punishes
Article 381 defines the most serious form of road-safety offence: driving a motor vehicle or moped with manifest disregard for other people's lives, carrying out the conduct described in Article 380 (grossly reckless driving that creates a concrete danger to people's life or physical integrity). It is not, therefore, a stand-alone offence in terms of conduct: it builds on the same reckless driving as Article 380, but adds a qualified subjective element — an extra degree of indifference towards others' lives that goes beyond mere conscious recklessness.
This manifest disregard is what case law and legal commentary usually call the "kamikaze" driver: driving the wrong way down a motorway, taking part in illegal street races on urban roads with traffic, or fleeing a police checkpoint by driving at high speed into oncoming traffic are the most common examples. The provision also distinguishes cases where a concrete danger to other people's life or physical integrity actually materialised from those where it did not.
Penalty
Where the conduct creates a concrete danger to people's life or physical integrity, the penalty is two to five years' imprisonment, a fine of twelve to twenty-four months, and disqualification from driving motor vehicles and mopeds for six to ten years (paragraph 1). If, despite the manifest disregard for life, that danger never materialised, the penalty drops to one to two years' imprisonment, a fine of six to twelve months, and the same six-to-ten-year driving disqualification (paragraph 2).
The boundary with Article 380 and intentional homicide
The dividing line with Article 380 (grossly reckless driving with concrete danger, punished only with six months to two years' imprisonment) lies precisely in that subjective element: reckless driving alone is not enough — an attitude of indifference towards the harmful outcome is required. Where reckless driving does end up causing someone's death, the classification may shift towards homicide, with possible dolus eventualis in the most serious cases, in concurrence with the road-safety offence.
Defence strategy
The defence focuses above all on disputing whether that extra subjective element was genuinely present, or whether the facts should instead fall under Article 380, with substantially lower penalties: evidence on speed, the traffic present at the time and place, and the context of the driving (a panicked escape rather than a deliberately reckless manoeuvre) are decisive. It is also worth checking whether there was a real, concrete danger to identifiable people, rather than an abstract risk, since that determines whether paragraph 1 or the more lenient paragraph 2 applies.