Lviv appeal court upholds a Jehovah's Witness call-up as a Kyiv panel reads the same law the other way

Ukraine's Eighth Appellate Administrative Court, which sits in Lviv, dismissed on 19 August 2026 the appeal of a Jehovah's Witness against his wartime call-up. He had asked the courts to cancel the order that put him in the army and to make the army let him go. The judgment that had refused him — given by the Ivano-Frankivsk District Administrative Court, the trial-level court that heard the case first, on 21 November 2025 — stands unchanged.^[1]

Three months earlier, on 25 May 2026, a different panel of the same Lviv court had done close to the opposite for a different Witness. It set aside a trial-level judgment from Zakarpattia and cancelled a recruitment centre's order of 14 June 2024 in the part that called that man up and sent him to a unit.^[2]

And a month before that, on 23 April 2026, the Sixth Appellate Administrative Court in Kyiv went further still. Ruling for a Witness whose request for unarmed civilian service the local administration had never decided either way, it held that Ukrainian law does not clearly confine that service to peacetime conscription — the proposition on which both Lviv panels agreed. That judgment is final and cannot be appealed.^[3]

None of the three men is named. Ukraine's Unified State Register of Court Decisions replaces the names of private parties with placeholders, and each judgment carries its claimant only as "ОСОБА_1". The judges are named; the claimants are not. The August ruling was reported in Ukraine on 25 August by the Ivano-Frankivsk outlet pravda.if.ua,^[4] the May ruling by lviv.media on 29 May.^[5]

Three appellate panels, then, have reached three different results in four months, on statutes none of them can change. No Supreme Court ruling reconciling them was found in the searches of the judgment register described below.

The words the cases turn on

(English renderings of Ukrainian text in this article are ours.)

Ukrainian law treats conscription and mobilisation as two different things. Conscription — строкова військова служба, "fixed-term military service" — is the peacetime call-up of young men for a set period. Mobilisation is the wartime call-up of reservists and others already on the military register, running under the general mobilisation declared on 24 February 2022.^[1]

The body that does the calling up locally is a territorial recruitment and social support centre — the office that keeps the military register, issues summonses, runs medical boards and signs call-up orders. It is called a recruitment centre throughout below.^[1]

Alternative (non-military) service is the unarmed civilian work Ukraine offers people whose religion forbids bearing arms. It is governed by a law of 12 December 1991, No. 1975-XII, whose first article says the service "is introduced in place of fixed-term military service." Both Lviv judgments read that as a ceiling, in almost identical words:

— "alternative service is a service that is introduced in place of fixed-term military service specifically."^[1][2]

A deferment (відстрочка) is a formal postponement of a call-up. The grounds are listed in Article 23 of the Mobilisation Law, No. 3543-XII, and are granted by a commission at the recruitment centre under a Cabinet procedure of 16 May 2024, No. 560.^[1]

Bronyuvannia (бронювання) is a separate route out: the reservation of named employees of listed bodies and organisations from call-up. Clergy can be reserved, but only against a list of posts approved by the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience.^[1]

Two Witness terms matter here, because one of the rulings turns on money. In Jehovah's Witness congregations an elder and a ministerial servant (also rendered deacon) are appointed men who teach and help run congregation life. On the account the courts have been given, the denomination has no paid clergy, and maintains no religious training college in Ukraine. Whether that is so in law has been before the Supreme Court, and is unresolved. In a 2023 conscription case a ministerial servant argued — relying on a Religious Centre letter of 22 October 2018 — that all congregation ministerial servants serve without charge, that none is in an employment relationship with his congregation, and that the confession maintains no religious training college anywhere in Ukraine. The Supreme Court did not decide whether that was so. It held that the courts below had never examined how such men are appointed, what is required of them, how long they serve or what they do, and sent the case back for those questions to be answered.^[6]

Finally, the court tiers. A trial-level, or first-instance, district administrative court decides the case; an appellate court reviews that decision and may quash it — set it aside; and cassation, in the Supreme Court, is the final and narrowest tier, open only on limited legal grounds.

What the 19 August panel decided

The panel — A. R. Kurylets presiding, with O. B. Zaverukha and O. I. Mikula — decided the appeal on the papers, without a hearing, and dismissed it.^[1]

The register describes the claimant precisely. A certificate of 11 June 2025, No. 7251, from the Religious Organisation "Religious Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine" records that on 28 December 2024 he was appointed "на посаду священнослужителя - служителем (дияконом) збору" — "to the position of minister — ministerial servant (deacon) of the congregation." His duties are described as teaching from the Bible in his congregation, carrying knowledge of it from house to house, and each month teaching interested people the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses free of charge.^[1] The Ukrainian press called him simply a священнослужитель, a clergyman.^[4]

His case, as the judgment sets it out, was this. Jehovah's Witnesses appear on the state's list of faiths whose doctrine forbids the use of weapons; the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience registers religious organisations and keeps the relevant lists, and a certificate from the organisation is the official proof of a person's standing in it. Article 35 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of belief and provides that military duty conflicting with religious conviction must be replaced by alternative service. If, under martial law, alternative service cannot in practice be performed, then — he argued — a deferment covering the whole mobilisation period must follow instead.^[1]

The chronology is compressed. On 9 July 2025 he posted an application to the recruitment centre asking for his mobilisation duty to be replaced by alternative service and for that deferment; it was registered there on 10 July under incoming number 297. On 12 July a medical board found him fit for service in support, training, medical, logistics, communications and guard units. That same day, order No. 441 called him up and sent him to a unit. On 13 July, unit order No. 3 appointed him a radiotelephone operator and entered him on the unit's personnel lists. On 14 July, unit order No. 4 removed him from the unit's supply — its rations, pay and kit — recording that this was in connection with leaving the military unit without authorisation. The judgment records that order and says nothing further about it, and no proceeding arising from it appears anywhere in the judgment. On 25 July the recruitment centre wrote back, letter No. 1/2606, saying that conscription and mobilisation are separate types of service and that the law provides alternative service only in place of the former.^[1]

The central question, in the panel's own words, was whether he had a right to a deferment at all — "ключовим у цій справі є встановлення чи мав позивач … права на отримання відстрочки". Its answer was that Article 23 of the Mobilisation Law sets out an exhaustive list of grounds, that the Cabinet procedure adds none, and that the catch-all in paragraph 24 of that list — "other persons liable for military service or particular categories of citizens in cases provided for by law" — is not open-ended: the accompanying schedule identifies exactly two narrow categories it covers, and he fell into neither.^[1]

Article 35 of the Constitution did not fill the gap. The provision on replacing military duty with alternative service, the panel held, "is not identical to a right to deferment and does not create for a citizen a right to obtain one on the ground of the need to replace one type of service with another."^[1]

The judgment also addresses Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It sets out the test for restricting religious practice — lawfulness, legitimate aim, proportionality — states that a person refusing service on grounds of conscience "must demonstrate deep, sincere and consistent religious convictions" by material beyond his own assertions, and concludes that an interference not prescribed by law and not necessary in a democratic society had not occurred.^[1]

The bronyuvannia route failed on an employment test. Under a Cabinet procedure of 27 January 2023, No. 76, clergy may be reserved from call-up by reference to a list of posts approved by the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience — order No. Н-21/11 of 5 February 2025, registered with the Ministry of Justice on 19 February 2025. Two of that list's four entries require an employment relationship with the religious organisation. His certificate said nothing about one, so the panel checked the State Register of Individual Taxpayers itself and found he had received no recorded income from the Religious Centre. Without pay, it reasoned, there is no employment relationship; without an employment relationship, no reservation.^[1]

Two further strands disposed of the rest. His request for alternative service had gone to the wrong body: under the 1999 Regulation No. 2066 such applications go to the local state administration, not to a recruitment centre, so the centre answered it correctly as an ordinary citizen's petition. And his claim to be discharged failed on its own terms — the case file contained no report submitted to his unit commander seeking release, and he had shown no ground for discharge under Article 26 of the Military Duty Law. Separately, the panel added, he had in any event acquired the status of a serviceman on 12 July 2025, and settled Supreme Court authority holds that a deferment can be formalised only before that moment.^[1]

One finding cuts the other way, and the judgment does not soften it. The panel held that the recruitment centre should have decided his 9 July application under Procedure No. 560 and never did — unlawful inaction, in its own words. It also reproduced paragraph 60 of that same procedure: "До ухвалення комісією рішення військовозобов'язаний не підлягає призову на військову службу під час мобілізації, на особливий період" — "until the commission adopts a decision, the person liable for military service is not subject to call-up during mobilisation, in the special period." The panel found that no decision had been adopted — not when he brought his claim and not on the day it gave judgment — and upheld the call-up all the same. It does give its bridge between the two, in the sentence immediately after the one it had quoted. "In the context of the foregoing," it wrote, a deferment right has to be realised by the person's own active steps — an application on the prescribed form, with the documents that prove the right — and then formalised by the commission; and it can be realised only up to the moment he acquires the status of a serviceman. He acquired that status on 12 July 2025. Having said so, the panel turned to what it called the key question in the case: whether he had any right to a deferment at all. Finding Article 23's list of grounds exhaustive and none of them his, it concluded there were no legal grounds to declare the call-up order unlawful.^[1]

What the judgment does not address is the gap in between. His application reached the recruitment centre and was registered there on 10 July 2025, as incoming No. 297. The call-up order is dated 12 July. On the face of paragraph 60 he was not liable to call-up during those two days, because the commission had adopted no decision — and the judgment does not say why that sentence did not apply to him in that window.^[1]

What the 25 May panel decided

The earlier Lviv panel — R. B. Khobor presiding, with N. V. Brunovska and I. I. Zapotichnyi — agreed with the trial court that alternative service replaces conscription only. It addressed almost nothing else the August panel addressed: it takes as its premise, in its own voice, that the Mobilisation Law provides believers neither a deferment nor a substitution procedure, and it contains no Article 35 analysis and no clergy reservation. It allowed the appeal on a different question altogether.^[2]

That claimant's pleading described him as a baptised Jehovah's Witness and a dedicated minister appointed to the post of minister-elder. The panel found that on 14 June 2024, inside the recruitment centre, he told officials orally that his convictions barred him from military service; a certificate from the Religious Centre, No. 11342, was dated three days later, on 17 June 2024. The centre did not dispute receiving the information. On 18 July 2024 he posted a written application seeking alternative service. What the centre had before it, the panel held, amounted to an unequivocal and unqualified refusal.^[2]

From there the reasoning runs through Article 19(2) of the Constitution, which requires state bodies to act "only on the basis, within the limits of the powers, and in the manner" that the law prescribes. Faced with a refusal it considered unfounded, the panel held, the centre had exactly two lawful options. It could draw up an administrative-offence report under Articles 210 and 210-1 of the Code on Administrative Offences — the penalty route for breaches of the military-registration and mobilisation rules, of which failing to appear on a summons is one. Or it could notify criminal investigators of a possible offence under Article 336 of the Criminal Code, which covers evading a call-up during mobilisation. It did neither. On the same day, it issued order No. 482 and sent him to a unit.

— "Thus the defendant, while claiming to act exclusively within the law, in fact went beyond those limits, because the forced call-up of a person to military service contrary to that person's direct written refusal is not provided for by any law, and no law grants the defendant the possibility of carrying out such a call-up…"^[2]

He did not win everything. His separate claim that he had been brought to the recruitment centre against his will was refused. The panel found that no привід — the formal police measure of compelled delivery — had been applied; that he offered no evidence of forcible delivery beyond his own assertions; that his sister's complaints to the National Police and to other state bodies were not admissible proof, because she was not a party or an authorised representative and because none of those approaches ended in a decision by any competent body establishing that he had been unlawfully delivered; and that he had signed a notice of his call-up that day without recording any objection.^[2]

What the 23 April panel decided

The Sixth Appellate Administrative Court in Kyiv — M. I. Kobal presiding, with N. P. Buzhak and Yu. K. Cherpak — heard a claim against the Cherkasy district state administration, not a recruitment centre. On 3 March 2025 the claimant, whose membership rests on a Religious Centre certificate of 23 September 2024, No. 15925, applied to that administration to be sent to alternative service. It replied the next day that alternative service exists only in place of conscription and that the law provides no route to it during mobilisation. The Cherkasy trial-level court agreed and dismissed his claim.^[3]

The appellate panel quashed that judgment and allowed the claim in full. Its reasoning is the mirror image of the Lviv panels':

— "current legislation does not clearly regulate that alternative (non-military) service applies in place of fixed-term military service specifically… persons liable for military service have the right to replace performance of the military duty itself with alternative service, in the absence of restrictions in the legislation on undergoing alternative service."^[3]

The panel pointed to the preamble of the same 1991 law, which speaks of replacing military duty, not fixed-term service. It declared the administration's handling of the application unlawful, held that it had considered the request only formally and had taken neither of the two decisions the 1999 Regulation No. 2066 allows, and ordered it to decide the application on the merits. It awarded him his court fee of 3,028 hryvnias. The judgment states that it is final and not subject to cassation appeal.^[3]

What separated the rulings

The August claimant went to court to have the call-up order declared unlawful and cancelled, and to be discharged and struck from the unit's lists — an attack on the order, exactly as the May claimant's was. The deferment was what he had asked the recruitment centre for.

The August panel did decide the order's lawfulness, concluding that there were no legal grounds to declare order No. 441 unlawful in the part calling him up. But it reached that conclusion by asking whether he had any entitlement the centre had overridden, and finding none. The question the May panel asked — whether a recruitment centre has power to push a call-up through in the face of a refusal, whatever the merits of that refusal — it never put.

The facts pushed the cases apart as well. The May claimant refused face to face, in the building, before the order issued. The August claimant posted an application and was called up two days after it was registered. And the May panel's answer was about the limits of an official's power, not about religion: it said expressly that the claimant's lack of a right to alternative service did not give the centre a right to act in a way the law does not provide for.

Neither Lviv judgment mentions the other. Neither mentions the Kyiv ruling of 23 April. On the statute at the heart of all three, the Kyiv panel simply reads Law No. 1975-XII differently, and its judgment is beyond appeal.

The wider record

A full-text search of the register for the phrase Свідків Єгови, run on 29 August 2026 and repeated on 5 September 2026, returns five 2026 appellate administrative judgments in which the claimant is confirmed to be a Jehovah's Witness: the three above, plus two more. That is a floor, not a census — a judgment that writes the name differently, or that describes the claimant's faith without naming it, would not appear in this search. On 18 February 2026 the Third Appellate Administrative Court in Dnipro dismissed the appeal of a dedicated baptised minister who complained that a recruitment centre had failed to register and consider his refusal and had held him against his will. The sequence there ran the other way round from the Lviv procedure: police delivered him to the centre at 17:07 on 16 May 2025 on detecting signs of failing to appear on a summons, an offence under Article 210-1(3), and a recruitment officer drew up that report the same day — two days before the application he later complained about was posted.^[7] On 20 May 2026 the Sixth Appellate Administrative Court dismissed a Witness university student's challenge to compulsory basic military training, a different question from a call-up.^[8]

The same search returns ten 2026 appellate administrative judgments mentioning Jehovah's Witnesses at all. In the other five the claimants belong to other churches — a Seventh-day Adventist congregation, a Church of Evangelical Faith Christians in Hnivan, a Vinnytsia Bible church, an independent New Testament Christian church in Mykolaiv, and an anonymised Vinnytsia religious community — and the Witnesses appear only as a citation to European Court of Human Rights case law or to the Cabinet's list of faiths that forbid weapons.

No Cassation Administrative Court ruling settling the mobilisation question was found. A companion search of the same register, limited to the cassation instance and run over 1 January 2022 to 5 September 2026, returned four Cassation Administrative Court documents; all four were opened and read. One — a ruling of 1 October 2025 — closes proceedings over an application for interim measures and decides nothing on the substance.^[9] The other three are not mobilisation cases at all: a 2024 VAT dispute involving the Religious Centre, a 2022 refusal to open cassation proceedings in an asylum case brought by a Russian citizen against the State Migration Service,^[11] and the 2023 conscription ruling described next. The Supreme Court has come closest in a conscription case, in 2023. A Witness ministerial servant had been refused the deferment the law gives to clergy, because he held no diploma from a religious training college. The Cassation Administrative Court quashed both lower judgments and sent the case back to Kirovohrad. It held that those courts had been wrong to treat alternative service as an alternative to the clergy deferment — the two have different legal natures — and that the statutory definition of a minister, built around a religious-education diploma and a post in a registered organisation, "does not take account of the particularities of other confessions." A state that grants a category of people a right, it added, must write rules that account for the distinctive features of groups within that category.^[6] The Supreme Court authority the administrative courts actually quote for "alternative service replaces conscription only" comes from the other side of the building: a criminal cassation ruling of 2 May 2024, relied on by the Zakarpattia court at first instance in the May case.^[10]

All three 2026 judgments took legal effect on the day they were given. The Kyiv judgment is final and closed: the losing administration asked the same panel on 1 May 2026 to explain it, and on 15 May the panel refused, holding the judgment clear and properly reasoned.^[12] Each Lviv judgment preserved a narrow thirty-day route to the Supreme Court — the only route by which any of this reaches a court that could reconcile it. The May window closed at the end of June 2026, and the register's listing for that case, searched on 5 September 2026, shows nothing filed after the judgment itself. In the August case the window runs from the drawing-up of the full text on 19 August 2026 and closes around 18 September 2026.