News and primary-source research on the Watchtower organization
Five men who refused a mobilisation call-up each drew three years, four of them suspended. The two the army had already taken in drew five years, neither suspended — one a man posted as a cook in a supply section, who told the Stryi court he had applied for alternative service in 2022. All are trial-court verdicts, and only one is recorded as having taken legal effect.
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.
In a final ruling of 19 August 2026, a panel of the Cassation Criminal Court upheld the conviction of a baptised Witness deacon under Article 336 for refusing a call-up notice, then released him from serving his three-year term on two years' probation. The precedent it applied — that belief is no answer to a mobilisation charge — is one two Supreme Court judges dissented from, that panels of the court tried three times to reopen, and whose underlying statutes four constitutional complaints were challenging as of the Court's notice of 6 May 2026. The same precedent holds that call-up during mobilisation does not cancel an objector's right to refuse to carry or use a weapon.