On March 19, 2026, officers of the Pechersk District Police in Kyiv, led by Senior Operative Serhiy Vitaliyovych Nakopyuk and accompanied by an unidentified individual claiming to represent the Territorial Recruitment Centre (TCC), detained Yurii Sheliazhenko on Perspektyvna Street. No legal grounds were provided. Yurii managed to call his lawyer, but the officers did not wait for the lawyer’s arrival. This is an abduction.
Yurii Sheliazhenko is a human rights defender, legal scholar, and one of Europe’s most prominent conscientious objectors – publicly declared since 1998. He is the executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, a board member of both the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection and World Beyond War, and a council member of the International Peace Bureau. He is a winner of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize.
Since 2023, the Ukrainian state has pursued him under Article 436-2 of the Criminal Code – which carries up to five years in prison – for a pacifist statement that explicitly condemned Russian aggression. His home was raided, his devices seized, and he was placed under house arrest. The trial has been postponed repeatedly and remains unresolved.
In December 2025, after Yurii delivered an anti-war Quaker sermon, Colonel Serhiy Kalugin of the local Territorial Recruitment Centre issued him a conscription order on the same day – a Sunday – demanding he report for military registration on Christmas Eve. Three months later, the authorities simply took him off the street.
We demand the immediate release of Yurii Sheliazhenko. We demand the withdrawal of all charges against him. And we call on the European institutions that claim to stand for human rights – the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe – to break their silence on the persecution of conscientious objectors in Ukraine.
The right to refuse to kill is not a wartime luxury. It is a foundational human right, enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and affirmed by the European Court of Human Rights. It applies in peace and in war, or it means nothing at all.
Free Yurii Sheliazhenko. Drop the charges. Respect the right to conscience.
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