Lviv appeal court upholds a Jehovah's Witness call-up as a Kyiv panel reads the same law the other way
On 19 August 2026 the Eighth Appellate Administrative Court in Lviv dismissed a Jehovah's Witness ministerial servant's challenge to his mobilisation call-up, holding that the statutory grounds for deferment are an exhaustive list he did not fall within — while finding, and not acting on, the recruitment centre's failure to decide his application at all. Three months earlier the same court quashed another Witness's call-up order, not on religious grounds but because a recruitment centre had exceeded its powers. And in April, in a judgment that is final and unappealable, a Kyiv panel held that Ukraine's alternative-service law is not clearly confined to peacetime conscription, absent any statutory restriction on that service — the proposition both Lviv panels treated as settled. No Supreme Court ruling reconciling them was found in the judgment-register searches this article describes.