Your first Ukrainian passport after 18, when you hold no Ukrainian documents

The short answer

• Seven working days, no fee. Point 8 of the Procedure approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 302 of 25 March 2015 gives seven working days for a passport issued for the first time, and no administrative fee is charged for it.
• You must be in Ukraine. A first passport after eighteen is filed at a territorial office of the migration service. During martial law it may also be filed at a branch of the state enterprise Document abroad, but then it takes up to three months instead of seven days.
• One parent’s document is enough. Point 35 asks for the originals of documents identifying and confirming the Ukrainian citizenship of “the parents or one of them” who were Ukrainian citizens when you were born.
• Lost contact with a parent is a recognised excuse. Where documents cannot be produced for good reason, including that contact has been lost, the citizenship check is run against the migration service registers instead.
• A foreign birth certificate must be legalised. Point 15 requires legalisation and a notarised Ukrainian translation for documents issued by foreign authorities. This is where cases get stuck, and it is solvable.

Which rule applies to you depends on when you were born

This is the first thing a lawyer checks and the thing most applicants get wrong.

Born from 1 March 2001

Article 7 of the Law on the Citizenship of Ukraine applies directly. A person one or both of whose parents were Ukrainian citizens at the moment of birth is a Ukrainian citizen, wherever the birth took place. The State Migration Service states on its own service page that Article 7 applies to persons born from 1 March 2001.

Born between 13 November 1991 and 28 February 2001

The law in force on your date of birth applies, which is the 1991 Law on the Citizenship of Ukraine. For a child born in Ukraine it is enough that one parent was a Ukrainian citizen. For a child born abroad to parents of different citizenships who both lived outside Ukraine, the 1991 Law required the written agreement of the parents, which is where old cases become difficult.

For this age group the Procedure approved by Presidential Decree No. 215 of 27 March 2001, in the wording of Decree No. 110/2026 of 11 February 2026, sets out a dedicated route: a verification of belonging to the citizenship of Ukraine, with its own short document list.

Born before 13 November 1991, or resident in Ukraine in 1991

Article 3 of the Law applies. Citizens of the former USSR who permanently resided in Ukraine on 24 August 1991 are citizens from that date; those who resided in Ukraine on 13 November 1991 and were not citizens of other states are citizens from that date. The law fixes the date itself, which is why a passport issued years later still proves citizenship as it stood in 1991.

What you actually file

Point 35 of Procedure No. 302, applied to an adult with no Ukrainian documents.

• Birth certificate, or an extract from the State Register of Civil Status Acts, or a document confirming the fact of birth issued by a foreign authority.
• Originals of a parent’s identity and citizenship documents, for a parent who was a Ukrainian citizen when you were born. An internal passport or a travel passport both qualify. If neither parent’s documents can be produced for good reason, you give a written explanation and the check is run against the registers.
• Information about a declared or registered place of residence, or confirmation that there is none. Having no registered address in Ukraine does not block the application.
• A document bearing your photograph, issued by an official body. A foreign passport serves. Without one the identification procedure starts, which takes up to two months.
• Your tax number, where you have one.
• A handwritten statement that you need a passport, and a separate sheet with your signature for scanning. These are in the final paragraphs of point 35 and are routinely forgotten.

Where a parent was a foreign national at the moment of your birth, point 35 asks instead for a certificate of registration as a Ukrainian citizen. Note that the “nationality” line in a Ukrainian birth certificate from the 1990s records ethnicity, not citizenship. A certificate that says a parent was Russian or Belarusian by ethnicity says nothing about that parent’s citizenship, and an official who reads it as citizenship is reading it wrong.

What the migration service does with your file

• It asks the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about you. Point 18 obliges the office, where it has no information on your citizenship, to verify it, including by sending queries to the Ministry about acquisition of Ukrainian citizenship and consular registration.
• It pulls your birth record electronically. Point 17 provides for the civil status data to be obtained through inter-agency electronic interaction, which is why it helps if your 1990s act record is already in the electronic register.
• It writes a conclusion. Point 44 requires a formal conclusion covering identification of the person, confirmation of the fact of state registration of the birth, and the citizenship check, approved by the head of the territorial office.
• It can run an identification procedure. Point 43 applies where no photo-bearing documents are filed: queries to the Ministry of Justice, civil registry offices, the police, the tax service, educational institutions, military units and prisons, and, failing that, questioning of a witness. The procedure may not exceed two months. Points 97-1 and 97-2 allow it to be done by videoconference.

Refusal grounds are in point 100. The two that matter here are the first, that the person is not a Ukrainian citizen, and the fifth, that documents were filed incompletely and the defects were not cured in time.

The hard case: a birth certificate that cannot be legalised

If your birth was registered abroad, Ukraine will not simply accept the certificate. Point 15 of Procedure No. 302 requires legalisation unless an international treaty says otherwise, plus a notarised Ukrainian translation. Article 13 of the Law on Private International Law says the same for all foreign documents.

For documents issued in the Russian Federation the treaty route closed. The 1993 Minsk Convention was suspended in relations with Russia from 27 December 2022 by Law No. 2783-IX of 1 December 2022. An apostille is therefore required, and for most of our clients obtaining one inside Russia is impossible.

There is also no civil registry workaround. A Ukrainian civil registry office does not re-register a birth that a foreign authority has already registered, and the Ministry of Justice has explained that the law does not provide for entering such a foreign registration into the Register.

What does work

• The consular file. If a Ukrainian mission ever documented you or your parents, that archive may hold a certified copy of the foreign birth certificate, the citizenship determination materials, the parents’ applications and the photographs. We have obtained files going back to 1997 this way, and in one case the same photograph appeared in the mother’s 1997 citizenship questionnaire, on the children’s page of her passport and in the child’s own 1998 passport. A Ukrainian state body certifying its own archive is not a foreign document and does not need an apostille.
• A civil register extract from the country of the parent’s citizenship, where that country recorded the birth.
• A court decision establishing the fact of birth, under Article 315(1)(7) of the Code of Civil Procedure, where a civil registry office cannot register it.

The court route has a jurisdiction trap

On 11 December 2024, in case No. 552/2490/23, the Supreme Court closed proceedings on an application to establish the fact of a birth abroad. Two reasons: the event took place outside Ukraine, and the case did not concern the personal status of a citizen of Ukraine, the applicant being a citizen of a third state.

That second reason is also the way through. Point 9 of Article 76(1) of the Law on Private International Law gives Ukrainian courts jurisdiction over a non-contentious case concerning the personal status of a citizen of Ukraine. So the order of operations matters: confirm citizenship first, in writing, and only then go to court. Done the other way round, the case is closed without a decision.

A residence permit is not a parallel plan

Clients who are tired of waiting sometimes ask whether they can take a temporary residence permit on their foreign passport while the citizenship question is sorted out. The two tracks contradict each other.

Point 61 of the Procedure approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 322 of 25 April 2018 refuses a temporary residence permit where the applicant is established to be a Ukrainian citizen, and a permit already issued can be revoked on the same basis. In other words, the moment the migration service confirms your citizenship, the permit route closes behind you.

It can still be the right call for a few months, for example where someone is in Ukraine without a lawful basis, is pregnant or needs to marry. It is a bridge, not a destination, and it should be chosen with open eyes.

The name on your documents

Your surname will be transliterated from the Ukrainian spelling in your birth certificate. If every other document you own uses a different Latin spelling, raise it at the application, not afterwards.

For the travel passport, point 108 of Procedure No. 152 allows a different Latin spelling on written request, based on an earlier Ukrainian identity document, a foreign birth or name change document, or the spelling used in a passport issued to your child, parent or spouse, including a foreign passport where that person is a foreign national.

What it costs

State fees, notarial fees, translations, legalisation and court fees are paid separately and are not part of our fee. The first ID card itself carries no administrative fee.

How we work on this

1. We date your case. Your date of birth decides which law applies and therefore which document set you need. This takes ten minutes and saves months.
2. We ask the authorities in writing. A lawyer’s request to the State Migration Service and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: whether you belong to Ukrainian citizenship, whether any decision on loss or termination exists, whether you appear in the registers, and what the consular archive holds. Five working days by statute.
3. We reconstruct the proof. Consular files, civil register extracts, the parents’ documents and the stamps in them. This is where cases are won.
4. We assemble the application. The point 35 set for your facts, the written explanation where a parent’s document is missing, the handwritten statement and the signature sheet, the transliteration request.
5. We go to court only if we have to, and only after citizenship is confirmed in writing, so that jurisdiction is not an issue.

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, which decides 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 getting a Ukrainian passport abroad , our guide to Ukrainian citizenship by descent under the 2026 law and our services.

Last updated: 5 November 2026