By The Friend, August 14, 2025

Yurii Sheliazhenko speaks to Matthew Syed of the BBC for the Radio 4 Sideways programme.

A Quaker in Ukraine has told the BBC of his difficulties in refusing to join the country’s army.

Yurii Sheliazhenko, of the newly-formed Meeting of Friends in Ukraine, lives in Kyiv. He speaks to Matthew Syed of the BBC for the Radio 4 Sideways programme, for a mini-series entitled ‘Chasing peace’.

Yurii, forty-three, grew up amid the end of the cold war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘it seemed wrong to me that we still had an army, and still prepared for war’. He decided in 2019 that he would always be a conscientious objector (CO).

He tells Matthew Syed – whose own grandfather was one of 60,000 conscientious objectors in the second world war – that he had ‘always dreamed of peace’. His Quaker faith, which has ‘opposed conflict for hundreds of years’, led him to believe that ‘if you kill someone, you kill that of God in them’.

After the war began, he says, ‘Three recruiters came to my home and attempted to give me a draft call. I refused to take it. They broke my post box to insert it. Later I burned my draft card, on International Day of Conscientious Objectors.’

He instead wrote a call for peace, condemning Russian aggression but calling for a peaceful resolution, citing the United Nations-approved right to refuse to kill. He sent it to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

His document was interpreted as a threat to national security, and, one year into the war, authorities invaded his home. As reported in the Friend last year, he was charged with ‘justifying Russian aggression’, and placed under partial house arrest.

The right to conscientious objection to military service is constitutionally guaranteed in Ukraine, but its application is being restricted during wartime. The option of alternative service became unavailable after martial law was declared in 2022. War Resisters’ International says that hundreds of cases are pending against COs, with a maximum sentence of three to five years.

Yurii tells Matthew Syed of his ‘sudden realisation’ that choosing peace had made him an enemy. This was of course ‘very sad’, but ‘you need to stay true to your peaceful nature… I will not allow anyone to force me to kill’.

Syed confesses that this approach ‘is hard to get your head around’ but recognises, through his own grandfather, that it is not the result of cowardice. In the episode he also talks to: Rachel Julian, a professor of Peace Studies at Leeds Beckett University; Wasim Almasri, director of programmes of the Alliance for Middle East Peace; and Lisa Schirch, a professor of the Practice of Technology and Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame.

The programme will air on Radio 4 on 30 July. It is available now at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002g7b9**.

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