Ukraine's Supreme Court releases a Jehovah's Witness from prison — and confirms that religious belief is no defence to refusing mobilisation

A Jehovah's Witness serving three years for refusing a mobilisation call-up notice was ordered out of prison in August. Ukraine's Supreme Court left his conviction standing and left the three-year term itself standing — then released him from serving it, on two years' probation, and ordered him freed from the penal institution the same day.^[1][2]

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

The ruling was delivered on 19 August 2026 by a three-judge panel of the Third Judicial Chamber of the Cassation Criminal Court — the division of Ukraine's Supreme Court that checks lower courts for legal error, and which by law may not re-weigh the evidence or decide afresh whether a particular piece of evidence was truthful — in case No. 608/1088/23.^[1] It took effect on delivery, is final and cannot be appealed.^[1] The register's own listing for the case, searched on 5 September 2026, records fifteen documents in it and none later than the two rulings of 19 August 2026.^[9]

It applies a rule that now governs every Ukrainian liable for call-up who refuses on grounds of belief: religious conviction is no defence to refusing mobilisation. In this case, as in the precedent it applied, the court suspended the prison term anyway. Ukraine's Constitutional Court — a separate court that rules only on whether laws comply with the Constitution — had four challenges to the law behind that result before it, on the Court's own notice of 6 May 2026.^[8]

What happened at the recruitment office

On 10 April 2023, at about 3:20 p.m., the man was inside a territorial recruitment and social support centre — the local call-up office Ukrainians know as a TTsK. Staff tried to hand him a notice requiring him to report the next morning for dispatch to a military unit. He refused to take it, and the next day he did not appear.^[1]

He gave his reason on the spot: he had been born into a Jehovah's Witness family, was baptised in 2014 and served as a deacon — an appointed servant of a local congregation — and held convictions that did not allow him to pick up a weapon, put on a uniform, or perform military duty of any kind. He had already applied, both to the recruitment centre and to a second body, to have military service replaced with alternative (non-military) service. No participant in the proceedings disputed that this was genuinely his reason.^[1]

He nevertheless pleaded not guilty. His lawyer argued that he was not a person liable to call-up at all and that he lacked the intent the offence requires, because he had asked for a substitution rather than refusing his obligations; his father, mother, brother and sister gave evidence about his upbringing in the faith.^[3] The trial court rejected that, treating it as a strategy chosen to avoid criminal liability.^[3] The courts below found that no insurmountable conflict existed between his beliefs and the duty in Article 65 of the Constitution to defend the country, and that he had no factual or legal grounds for conscientious refusal.^[1]

The Chortkiv District Court of Ternopil Oblast convicted him on 8 November 2024 under Article 336 of Ukraine's Criminal Code — evading call-up for military service during mobilisation — and imposed three years' imprisonment. The Ternopil Court of Appeal upheld that on 3 December 2025.^[1] By the time the Supreme Court heard the case he was in a penal institution, taking part by video link.^[1]

The binding rule, and where it came from

His lawyer asked the Supreme Court to throw the prosecution out altogether, arguing that a sincere conscientious objector commits no offence, and citing Article 35(4) of Ukraine's Constitution — the clause that says military duty must be replaced by alternative service where performing it conflicts with a citizen's religious beliefs, set out in full below — and Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion.^[1]

The panel refused, because the question had already been settled inside its own court. On 27 October 2025, in case No. 573/838/24, the joint chamber of the Cassation Criminal Court — an enlarged bench convened to resolve disagreements between the court's own panels — had ruled on exactly this point, and its conclusion binds later panels.^[1][4]

That case, too, concerned a Jehovah's Witness: a man recorded as a dedicated, baptised minister since 22 May 2004 and, from 4 January 2010, a clergyman and elder — in the court record, "elder (bishop)" of his congregation, one of the appointed men who lead it. He also received three years, and his term was also suspended.^[4]

The joint chamber's reasoning turns on a distinction most readers will not have met. Ukrainian law treats conscription — fixed-term service, historically the peacetime intake — and call-up during mobilisation as separate kinds of military service. The Alternative (Non-Military) Service Act offers believers a way out of the first. For the second, the joint chamber held, the law provides no such possibility and no procedure for one — and that gap is not an oversight:

Freedom to practise a religion, it continued, is not absolute. The Constitution, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention all permit limits in the interests of public order or safety, provided the limit is set by law and proportionate to its aim. General mobilisation was declared for the legitimate purpose of defence against an aggression that threatens the nation's existence, and a state in that position may impose proportionate restrictions — including ruling out refusal of military service on grounds of belief.^[4]

The joint chamber then added a qualification:

Religious and other convictions must be taken into account during service, the joint chamber held, and cannot result in a conscientious objector being made to carry out orders involving the carrying or use of weapons.^[4] It was careful about the limits of that: whether such an order may lawfully be refused "is not the subject of this consideration," it said, and it rejected the argument that an objector cannot be mobilised at all — submitting to military command and to service rules unconnected with weapons is not, on its view, a disproportionate interference.^[4]

Applying all of it, the 19 August panel held that the call-up was lawful and that what the man did was evasion within the meaning of Article 336.^[1] The defence's citations to the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, reports of the UN human rights office and separate opinions by Supreme Court judges gave "no grounds for a different legal assessment," it added; the existence of separate opinions or of a contrary academic position does not make a Supreme Court conclusion wrong.^[1]

Three times to the Grand Chamber, three times back

Panels of the Supreme Court's own judges tried three times to have that conclusion reconsidered.

Ukraine's criminal procedure code lets a cassation panel hand a case up to the Grand Chamber — the Supreme Court's largest formation, which resolves its most significant legal questions — when the panel believes an "exceptional legal problem" is at stake. Panels did that three times, and each time the case came back — the Grand Chamber returning the files on 11 February, 29 April and 17 June 2026.^[1]

On 19 January 2026 a panel of the Third Judicial Chamber referred case No. 459/2030/24, saying the law was genuinely uncertain and that the joint chamber's interpretation "potentially may expose the State to international responsibility for violation of Article 9 of the Convention" — because on that reading a person is prosecuted for exercising a right written directly into Article 35(4) of the Constitution, purely because the State has never built a mechanism to exercise it.^[1] The Grand Chamber returned the file on 11 February 2026.^[1]

On 3 March 2026 a panel of the First Judicial Chamber referred case No. 689/2280/23, saying the absence of a working legislative mechanism for alternative service touched fundamental rights and could not be treated as a ground for criminal liability, and that the problem was systemic, arising in a significant number of similar proceedings.^[1] The Grand Chamber returned that file on 29 April 2026, noting that the joint chamber had reached its conclusion after a systematic analysis of Ukrainian law.^[1]

On 17 June 2026 it returned a third, case No. 676/2395/25, saying that the questions raised had already been examined by the joint chamber and were sufficiently settled by its conclusion, and "mere disagreement with such a conclusion, absent proper justification against the defined criteria, does not indicate the existence of an exceptional legal problem."^[1]

Two judges disagree

The joint chamber itself did not decide unanimously. Two of its judges filed a separate opinion.^[5]

Article 35(4) of the Constitution has two sentences, and the two judges read them together:

That provision, they wrote, is a norm of direct effect — it applies of its own force, without waiting for legislation to implement it — and it contains no wartime carve-out. On their reading, a criminal court's task is to tell a person dodging duty apart from a person exercising freedom of conscience.^[5]

They also pointed to a document the majority did not address. Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 2066 of 10 November 1999 sets out the list of religious organisations whose teaching does not permit the use of weapons, and whose members were entitled to alternative service under the Act. Jehovah's Witnesses are on that list. "The State therefore recognises the incompatibility of this faith with the performance of military service," the two judges wrote.^[5]

They had an international authority of their own. On 18 March 2025 the Venice Commission — the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional law — published opinion No. CDL-AD(2025)006 on how the right to alternative service works in Ukraine under martial law. The two judges quoted it: the very nature of conscientious refusal means it "cannot be completely excluded even in wartime," though states have a narrow margin of appreciation, especially under general mobilisation, and in no circumstances may an objector be compelled to carry or use a weapon, even in the country's self-defence (paragraph 72). The same opinion, they noted, says that the duty of all citizens to defend the country under Article 65 of the Constitution does not in practice require every citizen to handle military weapons or to be placed inside the military chain of command.^[5]

There is a further wrinkle both sides have to live with. Ukraine's own military-service law no longer contains fixed-term conscription at all: legislation of 11 April 2024 replaced it with a category called basic military service.^[4][5] So the statutory route to alternative service — which by its terms substitutes only for fixed-term conscription — now substitutes for a kind of service that no longer exists. On the dissenting judges' account, that leaves the Constitution as the only place in Ukrainian law where the right currently lives.^[5]

Why he was let out anyway

Having dismissed the appeal, the panel turned to the sentence — something the criminal procedure code lets a cassation court do on its own initiative, provided the result does not worsen the convicted person's position.^[1]

The courts below had already weighed that the offence is classified as not grave, that he had no previous convictions and that he was well regarded where he lived — and had still found no basis for suspending the term.^[1] The panel weighed the same points and one more: certificate No. 1241 of 22 March 2023, issued by the religious organisation "Religious Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine," recording that he had been a dedicated, baptised minister of the Witnesses' religious association since 26 April 2014 and a clergyman and deacon of a congregation since 2 April 2016.^[1]

On that basis it applied Article 75 of the Criminal Code, which allows a court to release a person from serving a prison term of up to five years on probation where it concludes they can be reformed without imprisonment. The panel set a two-year probation period and ordered him to report periodically to the probation service, to notify it of any change of home or job, and not to leave Ukraine without its agreement — then ordered him freed from the penal institution.^[2]

Nearly ten months earlier, in the joint chamber's case, the pattern had been the same: conviction affirmed, prison term suspended.^[4]

Strasbourg, and a derogation Ukraine withdrew

Ukraine's courts have engaged with the European case law rather than passing over it.

It was the defence that cited Bayatyan v. Armenia, the European Court of Human Rights judgment of 7 July 2011, among numerous Strasbourg rulings on refusal of military service on religious grounds. The joint chamber said it accepted the European Court's reading of Article 9 in the context of conscientious objection — but held that conclusions drawn from peacetime events could not be treated as applying without qualification to Ukraine under full-scale invasion.^[4] Elsewhere in the same ruling it cited Cristian-Vasile Terheş v. Romania (2021) as an example of what may be characterised as an unforeseeable and exceptional situation.^[4]

It also dealt with derogation — the mechanism by which a government may formally suspend some Convention obligations in an emergency. Ukraine lodged one after the February 2022 invasion, and the joint chamber recorded that the country's derogation in respect of Article 9 was withdrawn with effect from 4 April 2024. "Accordingly," it wrote, "these provisions of the international treaties operate in full."^[4] It then upheld the restriction anyway, under the paragraph of Article 9 that permits proportionate limits without any derogation at all.

The two dissenting judges went further on the same point. Ukraine's 2022 note to the Council of Europe, they wrote, derogated from Article 9 only in its freedom-of-thought aspect — the equivalent of Article 34 of the Ukrainian Constitution — and never from freedom of conscience and religion under Article 35; the presidential decree introducing martial law did not suspend Article 35 either.^[5] On that reading the guarantee at issue was never suspended in the first place.

The constitutional challenge

The constitutional question the Supreme Court declined to reopen was taken up in a different court.

Ukraine's Constitutional Court took a series of constitutional complaints — the procedure by which a person who has exhausted the ordinary courts can challenge the law that was applied to them. They went to its Second Senate, one of the two senates the Court divides into. What follows comes from the Court's own published notices, each dated.

The Second Senate joined the complaints of Vitalii Alekseienko and Serhii Ivanushchenko into a single proceeding on 22 July 2025 and examined them in the open part of a plenary sitting on 1 October 2025.^[6] Both had been convicted under Article 336 after refusing mobilisation on religious grounds. Ivanushchenko, according to the Court's own account, produced a certificate from the Religious Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine showing that he had been a dedicated, baptised minister since 25 November 2023.^[6] The Court's published notices, read on 26 August 2026, do not state the religious affiliation of the other complainants.^[6][7][8]

Between them the two men challenge Articles 1, 2 and 4 of the Alternative (Non-Military) Service Act and part of Article 336 of the Criminal Code.^[6] Alekseienko's central argument is the same one the two dissenting Supreme Court judges made: because the Act offers alternative service only in place of fixed-term conscription, "which does not exist in Ukraine today," the constitutional right has been made impossible to exercise at all.^[6]

A third complaint, by Vitalii Kryushenko, came before the same senate on 8 April 2026 and was put off at his lawyer's request.^[7] It was taken up again on 6 May 2026, when the judge-rapporteur said the Court would consider joining it with the Alekseienko and Ivanushchenko cases and with a fourth, brought by D. B. Zelinskyi, and described all four as then pending.^[8]

Meanwhile the criminal rule stands. On the reasoning the Supreme Court applied on 19 August, a Ukrainian Jehovah's Witness who declines a mobilisation notice commits an offence — and one who accepts it cannot be made to carry out orders involving weapons, though the court that said so was careful to add that refusing such an order was not the question before it.^[1][4]