Various types of external non-stationary loads can act on various structural elements and cylindrical shells of finite length in particular distributed and concentrated, stationary and moving load. When using various external load identification methods, the type of external load is usually known. In prac- tice this is not always the case. The purpose of the study is to develop a method for identifying an arbitrary axisymmetric load acting on an elastic cy- lindrical shell of finite length, which can be used to identify a moving load. To model the non-stationary load of a cylindrical shell, a system of differ- ential equations of the refined Timoshenko theory for medium thickness shells was used. The solution to this system of differential equations is ob- tained by expanding the unknown functions into Fourier series and applying the integral Laplace transform. The solution of the inverse problem was obtained using the theory of integral equations and the Tikhonov regularization method. As a result of the study, a solution of the inverse problem of solid mechanics to identify an arbitrary axisymmetric non-stationary load was obtained. A numerical experiment was carried out to use the developed method to identify a moving non-stationary load acting on a simply supported cylindrical shell of medium thickness. The simulation results indicate a fairly accurate identification of both the change in time and the distribution along the shell of a non-stationary axisymmetric moving load. A method has been developed for identifying an external non-stationary load randomly distributed along a cylindrical shell, which makes it possible to identify a moving load without preliminary information about the type of this load. The developed method allows us to reproduce moving non-stationary loads, which are often encountered in practice, and expand it to other types of structural elements.