Yuriy Shukhevych is a Ukrainian politician, member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, repeatedly convicted for long terms in prison during the Soviet period.

Yuriy Shukhevych was born in 1933 in the family of the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych. In 1944, Yuriy Shukhevych with his mother was deported to Siberia as a family of a Ukrainian nationalist. Later, in 1946, as a child of “the enemy of the people” he was taken away from his mother and spent his childhood in orphanage. At the age of 15, Yuriy Shukhevych was sentenced for 10 years in prison for his connections with the Ukrainian nationalist underground as he tried to get in touch with his father. In 1958, before the end of his first sentence, he was sentenced for another 10 years of labour camps for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. After his release from prison, he joined shestidesiatniki movement. In 1972 he was imprisoned again for 10 years with subsequent 5 years of exile in Siberia for his active participation in the Ukrainian liberation movement as well as for his memoirs “Rozdumy vholos”, in which he gave an account of Stalinist labour camps. He was released from his third imprisonment as a disabled person with the complete loss of eyesight. In the 1980s and the 1990s he continued his political activities and was head of the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self-Defence.