Getting a Ukrainian passport abroad when you have never held one

The short answer

• The consulate issues the travel passport only. Under Article 22(5) of the Law on the Unified State Demographic Register, a passport for travel abroad is issued in Ukraine by the holder of the Register and abroad by a Ukrainian diplomatic mission. Article 21(5) of the same Law lists who may issue the internal ID card, and diplomatic missions are not on that list.
• You do not need a certificate of registration as a Ukrainian citizen if your parents were Ukrainian citizens when you were born. That exception is written into point 52(1) of the Procedure approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 152 of 7 May 2014.
• The consulate verifies your citizenship itself. Point 60 of the same Procedure says the decision is taken “following identification of the person and verification of the fact of belonging to the citizenship of Ukraine”. You do not have to prove it in advance with a separate certificate.
• Plan on up to three months. Point 8 caps the period, including the time needed to send the passport out, at three months. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs states on its own website that delivery by diplomatic post takes one and a half to three months.
• If you need both documents, you cannot do it at the consulate. The simultaneous procedure for an ID card and a travel passport, approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 1709 of 24 December 2025, lists the migration service, administrative service centres and the state enterprise Document, including its branches abroad. Consulates are absent from that list.

Who this page is for

Two situations come to us again and again, and they are not the same.

You were born in Ukraine and left as a child

Your birth was registered in a Ukrainian civil registry office, you hold the original paper birth certificate, one or both parents were Ukrainian citizens, and the family emigrated before you turned sixteen. You grew up on another country’s passport and were never issued anything Ukrainian. In law you have been a Ukrainian citizen your whole life. Nothing has ever terminated it.

You were born abroad to a Ukrainian parent

Your birth was registered by a foreign authority. Perhaps a Ukrainian consulate issued you a travel passport as a small child and it expired twenty years ago. Perhaps nothing was ever issued. Here the obstacle is rarely citizenship. It is the birth document, because a document issued by a foreign authority has to be legalised before Ukraine will look at it.

What the consulate asks about you

This is the part applicants never see and the part that decides the outcome. Point 62 of Procedure No. 152 obliges the mission to send a query to the State Migration Service to check:

• acquisition of Ukrainian citizenship;
• loss of Ukrainian citizenship;
• cancellation of decisions on the acquisition of citizenship;
• documents that identify you and confirm Ukrainian citizenship, and whether any were declared invalid;
• your declared or registered place of residence in Ukraine;
• whether documents were issued to you for departure abroad for permanent residence;
• or that no such records exist.

Point 61 sets the clock: the query goes out within one working day of the application being accepted, the check takes two working days, and the answer must arrive within five working days. For an urgent passport the answer is given the same day.

If the paper card index of the local migration office did not survive, or there is no information anywhere, point 62 allows queries to the police, the Ministry of Justice, the tax service, educational institutions, military units and prisons, in order to find a photograph that identifies you. Your written consent to the processing of personal data has to be attached to those queries.

The trap: leaving for permanent residence is not losing citizenship

Families who emigrated in the 1990s almost always went through the OVIR procedure for departure for permanent residence. The parent’s Ukrainian travel passport carries a framed stamp reading “Permanent residence” with the destination country written in by hand, and a round stamp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs over it. Children were entered on the “Children” page of the same passport.

People remember signing something about citizenship at that office and assume they renounced it. Usually they did not.

Departure for permanent residence and renunciation of citizenship were two different procedures. Renunciation took effect only on the day a decree of the President of Ukraine was issued. That is still the rule today: Article 19 of the Law on the Citizenship of Ukraine says the date of termination of citizenship is the date of the relevant presidential decree. No decree, no termination.

There is a second, very practical indicator. Article 25 of the same Law requires a consulate to withdraw the Ukrainian passport of a person whose citizenship has been terminated and to issue a certificate of termination instead. If the old Ukrainian passport is still in the family’s hands and nobody ever received such a certificate, that is strong evidence that citizenship was never terminated.

It is evidence, not proof. The only way to close the question is to ask the State Migration Service in writing. We do that with a lawyer’s formal request, which carries a five working day statutory deadline for the reply.

Another passport does not automatically cost you Ukrainian citizenship

Since 16 January 2026 the rules on multiple citizenship are written into the Law on the Citizenship of Ukraine by Law No. 4502-IX of 18 June 2025. Two things follow.

• Age at the moment you acquired the other citizenship decides everything. Voluntary acquisition of a foreign citizenship is a ground for loss only “if at the moment of such acquisition the person had reached the age of majority”. A child who received a foreign passport together with the family at the age of three has no ground for loss at all, whatever country it was.
• For adults, the country matters. Loss applies where the other state is recognised by Ukraine as an aggressor or occupier state, or is a state whose citizens cannot acquire Ukrainian citizenship under the simplified procedure. The list of states that can is approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 1412 of 5 November 2025, as amended by Resolutions No. 589 of 8 May 2026 and No. 826 of 24 June 2026. It currently contains 34 states: the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Moldova.

Even where a ground for loss exists, citizenship does not end by itself. A presidential decree is still required.

In relations with Ukraine you are recognised as a Ukrainian citizen only. That is the single-citizenship principle in Article 2 of the Law, and in practice it is a formality, not an obstacle.

What you take to the consulate

Point 52 of Procedure No. 152 is shorter than people expect. For an adult applying for a first travel passport abroad it comes to this.

Required

• A document identifying you. In practice this is your foreign passport, because without it the consul cannot carry out the identification that points 60 and 64 require.
• Proof of payment of the consular fee.
• The application form. The consul generates it on the spot and takes your biometric data there and then. There is nothing to prepare in advance.

If you have it

• A document confirming permanent residence or temporary stay abroad, such as a residence visa or a local identity card.
• Information about your declared or registered place of residence in Ukraine, or confirmation that there is none.
• Your Ukrainian tax number.

Not required by the list, but take it anyway

• Your birth certificate, original. Point 52 requires it only for applicants under fourteen. For an adult it is not on the list. It is still the document that shows where you were born and who your parents were, which is what the exception about parents rests on.
• A parent’s Ukrainian passport, original. Also not on the list. It is what shows that a parent was a Ukrainian citizen. An expired passport is still evidence of citizenship at the time it was issued, because citizenship is a continuous status and does not begin on the date a passport was printed.
• Written consent to the processing of your personal data. Point 62 requires it to be attached to the wider queries, and those queries are likely in any file from the 1990s.
• A notarised Ukrainian translation of the data page of your foreign passport. Not required by point 52, but consulates commonly ask for it. It is inexpensive and it removes a reason to send you away.

The name on your new passport

This catches almost everyone and it cannot be fixed afterwards without exchanging the passport.

Your surname will be written in Ukrainian and then in Latin letters according to the official transliteration rules. If your birth certificate says Rassadnikova, the default Latin spelling is RASSADNIKOVA, even if your foreign passport has said RASSADNIKOV for twenty years.

Point 108 of Procedure No. 152 allows a different spelling on written request, but only from three sources: an earlier Ukrainian identity document, a foreign birth or name change document, or the spelling of the surname in a passport previously issued to your child, your parent or your spouse, including a passport issued by a foreign state if that person is a foreign national.

So the route to matching your foreign passport usually runs through a parent’s passport, not your own. Decide this before the application is submitted, not after.

Where you can get the ID card instead

If you want the internal ID card as well, the consulate is the wrong counter. There are two places that can take it.

Point 19 of the Procedure approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 302 of 25 March 2015 allows a first passport after the age of eighteen to be filed at a branch of the state enterprise Document abroad during martial law. Those branches exist in thirteen countries, in Europe and North America. There is none in the Middle East or the Gulf, so for applicants in that region the realistic choice is the local consulate or a trip to Kyiv.

One more rule worth knowing before you plan anything by post. If the identification procedure has to be run, the finished passports are handed over only at a migration service office inside Ukraine and are not forwarded to a consulate or to a branch abroad.

If the consulate cannot confirm your citizenship

Sometimes the registers hold nothing about you, which is common for people documented in the 1990s. The formal instrument then is a verification of belonging to the citizenship of Ukraine, under the Procedure approved by Presidential Decree No. 215 of 27 March 2001, in the wording of Decree No. 110/2026 of 11 February 2026.

• Through a consulate: a decision no later than one month from the date the application is accepted, extendable by two months if information has to come from Ukraine.
• Through a migration service office in Ukraine: no later than three months.
• The result is a certificate of belonging, or of non-belonging, to the citizenship of Ukraine.

For people born between 13 November 1991 and 28 February 2001 the Procedure sets out its own short document list: the birth certificate or a foreign birth document, a parent’s Ukrainian passport showing that the parent was a citizen when you were born, and documents on the parents’ citizenship and the Ukrainian parent’s residence in Ukraine at that moment. Where a parent’s passport cannot be produced for good reason, the check is run against the registers instead.

What it costs

Consular fees, notarial fees, translations, legalisation and postage are paid separately and are not part of our fee.

How we work on this

1. We read your documents before anything is filed. Birth certificate, the parents’ Ukrainian passports including expired ones, every stamp in them, your foreign passport. The permanent residence stamp and the children’s page are usually where the answer is.
2. We send a lawyer’s request to the State Migration Service. Whether a decree on termination of your citizenship was ever issued, whether a submission on loss was ever made, whether you appear in the registers, whether documents for departure for permanent residence were issued to you. Five working days.
3. We send a lawyer’s request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The same questions plus consular registration and, where it exists, the archive of the mission that documented your family. Consular files from the 1990s have settled cases that looked hopeless.
4. We give you a written opinion. Whether you are a Ukrainian citizen today, on what legal basis, and what can be shown to a consul.
5. We prepare the consular application. The document set for your specific case, the transliteration request if the name has to match, the consent forms, and a written step by step note for the appointment.

Common questions

UA-Residency is the practice of Taras Guk, a licensed Ukrainian attorney in Kyiv (certificate KV No. 000685). Passports are issued by the State Migration Service of Ukraine and by Ukrainian diplomatic missions, which decide every application; we do not decide and we cannot guarantee that any application will be granted. You may apply yourself and pay only the official fees. Deadlines and fees are set by Ukrainian law and may change without notice. See also our page on a first Ukrainian passport after 18 , our guide to Ukrainian citizenship by descent under the 2026 law and our services.

Last updated: 5 November 2026