Through the gritty industrial streets of Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeast Ukraine, Mykola Korobtsov keeps driving forward. The fifty-seven-year-old Mennonite signed up to serve as a military chaplain immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.

Korobtsov has reason to hurry: Zaporizhzhia lies not thirty miles from the front line. Constant blackouts and the risk of Russian drones imperil everyone, citywide. For four years, he has made deliveries, prayed prayers, preached sermons – in short, everything necessary to meet the needs of soldiers and civilians in the area.

Everything, that is, except bear arms himself.

As a pacifist, Korobtsov refuses to wield weapons. Traditionally, as part of their commitment to Christian nonviolence, Mennonites refused, and were exempted from, all participation in military service. More recently, some Mennonites have volunteered for noncombatant roles, and some Mennonite churches have gone further and allowed members to bear arms if conscripted but not to volunteer for such roles.

Before the war, the chaplain, a pastor by vocation, ministered to disabled children and at-risk families. He is frankly spoken, even gruff at times. Yet his roughness belies a genuine mercy that he extends to all he meets.

We talk as he guides his beat-up gray van to Nova Poshta, Ukraine’s version of FedEx, where he will deliver a package of goods to some of the many needy troops in his network.

As we jostle down the potholed roads, a pair of tiny boxing gloves bobs from his rearview mirror – one yellow glove, one light blue, the fields-and-sky colors of the Ukrainian flag. The chaplain used to spar in his younger days. A glint in his eye suggests he still has a good dose of fight left in him.

For observers like me, who don’t immediately grasp the subtleties of degrees of pacifism in wartime, Korobtsov – the boxing conscientious objector – keeps a ready response.

He’s not against conscripted Mennonites agreeing to bear arms, he tells me, but he believes Mennonites should never volunteer to bear arms. He says he only delivers humanitarian supplies, not firearms, blades – “cold weapons,” to borrow the Slavic term – or other instruments of violence.

His views stand in dramatic contrast to majority opinion. Most of his fellow Ukrainians think such weapons are absolutely necessary.

Korobtsov embodies the compromises many Ukrainian pacifists are making, given the conflict’s affront to their peacemaking convictions. He feels that by volunteering for a noncombatant role he sets an example for his brethren – and shows what pacifists can to do when war comes to their doorstep.

Korobstov’s perspective derives from a broader practice, long sustained among traditionally pacifist denominations like Mennonites, Amish, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others, known as “active pacifism.” In this mode, proponents of nonviolence find alternative ways to take action, and serve, thereby waging peace instead of violence.

Oleksiy Garkusha, a twenty-eight-year-old pastor at Nova Nadiya (New Hope) Mennonite Church, explains that for him pacifism is not quite as simple as a participation exemption.

“We don’t take up arms, but we don’t tell the government, ‘We won’t serve,’” Garkusha says. “Everyone ought to serve.”

Instead, pacifists like himself point to humanitarian service, chaplaincy, and similar roles as God-honoring alternatives to soldiering. The pastors Korobtsov and Garkusha share meeting space at the Reimer Center, a charity that pools the resources of two evangelical communities in downtown Zaporizhzhia. I meet Korobtsov there one November morning to accompany him in his ministry for the day.

Ukraine’s Mennonites trace their roots back to German settlers arriving in the mid-eighteenth century, when Ukraine formed part of the Russian Empire. They came at the invitation of the Russian empress (and fellow German) Catherine the Great, who promised religious liberty, tax breaks, and freedom from military conscription. Ever since, local Mennonites have declined to fight – while still offering themselves in service in civilian roles.

As a developing country that only sometimes resembles a mature democracy, Ukraine’s laws on military service differ from those in much of the West. Conscientious objection is not legally recognized, and therefore not protected, under Ukraine’s current regime of martial law, according to the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, a watchdog. A court decision last year further emphasized the weak legal protections for war resisters: in April, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled against a Jehovah’s Witness objecting to military conscription on religious grounds. The individual received a three-year prison sentence.

Faced with compulsory service or prison, objectors in Ukraine would appear to have few options. Nonetheless, active pacifists like Korobtsov are finding ways to fulfill their civic duties, in ways distinct from more ordinary Ukrainians in uniform. They will have to persist as long as the fighting does, and as long as peace remains evasive.

Finished at Nova Poshta, Korobtsov drives onward, to a lunch appointment with a friend to whom he has long been evangelizing.

Along the way, the chaplain tells stories of how the war has changed him. Before 2022, Korobtsov felt “softer, more virtuous,” he says. Four years later, he feels the conflict has hardened him.

On more than one occasion, Korobtsov tells me, he has called a Ukrainian soldier contact, only to hear a Russian soldier answer the phone. The Russian voices have been cold, even mocking. The calls end up as short and pointless conversations. “I block the number, and that’s it,” he says. “I don’t sit around, reflecting. I have too much work to do.” He adds that losing soldiers who have not repented of their sins is hardest for him.

Arriving at the Da Vinci Restaurant along Cathedral Avenue, Zaporizhzhia’s famously long main thoroughfare, Korobtsov greets his old friend Konstantyn Chorny with a bear hug. The two have known each other since their school days. Chorny volunteered in the Ukrainian army in 2022, at the age of fifty-seven. In 2023, he received a serious shrapnel wound while fighting in the now-flattened eastern city of Bakhmut. One projectile, a metal shard the size of an arrowhead, tore through his left thigh. A separate scrap carved a deep track down his helmet. A spray of metal peppered his breastplate. Chorny spent eight months in the hospital, enduring five operations. His injuries were sufficiently grave to get him permanently demobilized out of service.

Korobtsov has encouraged Chorny to view his survival in spiritual terms. The soldier says he has begun attending a Ukrainian Orthodox church. Korobtsov has invited him to Mennonite gatherings, so far without success.

Chorny believes that God saved his life. A guardian angel might have watched over him, he says, sparing him more grievous injury, or death. Perhaps God afforded “some kind of mercy” toward him.

“Any man would believe in God after an experience like mine,” Chorny says.

After a final hug, Korobtsov steers his van to Zaporizhzhia’s western outskirts. We passed the city’s famous hydroelectric dam across the Dnipro River. The dam, once a prestige project lauded across the Soviet Union, helped tie Ukraine to Russia for most of the twentieth century. Now, the rusting hulk feels like a relic. Most Ukrainians hunger to move past those Soviet vestiges: in new infrastructure, freedom from a domineering neighbor, and a durable peace.

Meanwhile, Korobtsov is off to his next stop to sow a little peace of his own.

The surgery ward of Zaporizhzhia’s Central District Hospital is busy with an almost exclusively military patient group. Korobtsov hands out white plastic bags filled with toothpaste and toothbrushes, cookies, and other everyday items, as well as kelly-green copies of the New Testament in Ukrainian.

Men – old and young enough to be each other’s sons and fathers – mill around, killing time before or after their operations. A scummy green aquarium glugs in the corner. A portrait of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, hangs like an icon on the wall, illuminated by the depressing fluorescent light of hospitals everywhere.

Korobtsov gathers a few men into a kind of lounge area for a short service. With impassive faces, the men wait for what the chaplain has to say. Korobtsov offers a prayer to open, a quick sermon, and a prayer to close.

When Korobtsov introduces me, the “Amerikanksyi zhurnalíst,” and asks if they would speak with me, not a single man volunteers to offer his thoughts. A little needling brings a few forward, on the promise that their full names not be used, and that their faces not be photographed. Navigating their privacy, and their reticence, I manage to hear from a few of those hurt in the war. Some of them are heading back to fight as soon as they have healed.

Dmitro, thirty-five, has a leg operation scheduled for the next day, followed by a month of rehabilitation before returning to his unit. He has already served seven years – a reminder that Russia’s aggression began not in 2022 but in 2014, with the annexation of Ukraine’s southern peninsula of Crimea and the smaller-scale invasion of the eastern Donbas region. It was in the Donbas that Dmitro received his injury. The hospital here is comfortable, “normal,” in the classic Slavic expression.

But “I don’t know” about the days ahead, he says. “It’s too far away to plan.” He agrees to let Korobtsov pray for him, standing up to cross himself and receive the blessing in the Eastern Orthodox way.

Svyatyslav, twenty-two, is convalescing after a minor operation. He served in the Donbas and in the Zaporizhzhia region. He insists he is not tired of the war: “I’ll stay and fight as long as it takes.”

When I ask if he has any children, he replies only, “No. Thank God.”

Around the corner, in his own room, one soldier agrees to speak in fuller candor. Serhii Rulkov, forty-six, had surgery three days before, on his stomach and right leg. He is a Zaporizhzhian local, and fought for two years. His wife, Natalya, is here to support him this afternoon; she wears socks bearing tiny Ukrainian flags, part of the proliferation of blue-and-yellow everything common to Ukrainian street style since 2022.

Rulkov shows a photo of himself from the front, sporting a forelock and walrus-like mustache. Each of those features typifies the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a tradition of horseback warriors. In the hospital, Rulkov wears an army-green T-shirt with an embroidered trident, Ukraine’s national symbol and another ubiquitous image of patriotic solidarity.

Like Chorny, Rulkov’s wounds are sufficiently serious that he will be discharged with no further fighting or service required. Soon he will reunite with his son, twenty, and his daughter, nine.

Natalya notes the irony that her husband’s injury – grave enough for a service exemption, light enough not to kill him – brought him home to his family for good.

“He’s injured for life, but he came back alive, at least,” she says.

Korobtsov turns the conversation to faith. The couple both call themselves Christian Orthodox believers. Rulkov says he felt “closer to the truth” and God while at the front, given the clarity of thinking that life-and-death stakes can demand. “When rockets fly, you can only pray.”

Korobtsov prays for the couple and their family. We leave the hospital under thinning evening light, pushing east again across the Dnipro.

The after-work Bible study at the Nove Zhittya (New Life) Mennonite Church is well underway when we arrive, but Korobtsov takes charge of the meeting as soon as he walks in. Guiding the study through Luke 19:1–10, on the tax collector Zaccheus, who was so keen to see Jesus Christ and hear his words, Korobtsov focuses on the hope of ancient sinners like Zaccheus, who through his repentance could receive Jesus and rest in his salvation.

At a pause in the discussion, Korobtsov prompts those in the room to share about themselves, likely for my sake. Many came here from outlying villages, having seen fighting or their homes and communities damaged. Several have endured some interval of Russian occupation.

One woman, Natasha Volkova, sporting bottle-blonde hair and equally bright pink sneakers, says, “God has brought me here” – to Nove Zhittya and Zaporizhzhia city. Yet her husband, serving in the army for three years already, remains away from home. As she speaks about him, she bursts into tears. Korobtsov looks on without comment.

Benyamin Velichko, twenty-eight, is visiting the Bible study for the first time, and already plans to come back to Nove Zhittya. He does not say whether he is in the military – a sensitive subject among service-age males in Ukraine. As for getting through the war, he says simply, “My faith helps me, of course.”

Korobtsov prays to close the gathering and moves back out to the van. In the hour we spent inside, night has spread over the city like a carpet. Between energy rationing and the exodus of many thousands of locals, every evening in Zaporizhzhia gives way to eerie darkness. We return to the Reimer Center, where the long day began.

In an upstairs room – the only one lit in an otherwise inky-black building – elderly men and women chat and wait in line for tea. This is their weekly social time, as organized by the Mennonites of Nova Nadiya. Given the expense and scarcity of heating, the attendees mostly keep their hats and coats on. Amid the myriad disruptions of the war, meetings like this one offer Zaporizhzhian seniors the chance for face-to-face interaction – and to remember that they do not face the war alone.

The pastor Garkusha speaks first, encouraging the seniors through a study of Ephesians 4:31. The teaching feels appropriate, and challenging, for an audience under mortal threat from a nearby enemy. “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice,” Garkusha reads. The seniors nod in assent, or merely look ahead, unreactive.

Garkusha adds a less strictly Biblical reason for gratitude. “If we woke up in Zaporizhzhia this morning – praise God,” he says, smiling, and provoking similar smiles around the room.

Korobtsov, the only one there wearing fatigues, takes the pulpit to read from 1 Corinthians 9:16. His selection seems to resonate with the wartime chaplain’s life mission. “For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting,” Korobtsov reads, quoting the apostle Paul. “For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!”

Korobtsov trades places in the pulpit with Garkusha, who invites an open discussion of the verses and lesson. The chaplain gives me a silent hug, then walks down the stairs and into the darkness, no doubt planning tomorrow’s rounds.

His fading silhouette looks hardened, though undaunted, by the war not far away.

He has served well, and faithfully, doing a boxer’s fifteen rounds across this single day of service. Such is the necessity laid upon him. He evangelizes like his job – and the salvation of others – depends on it. Korobtsov’s pacifism is about as active as it gets.