The right to belong: Ukraine's progress in reducing statelessness and the new challenges of war
The right to belong: Ukraine's progress in reducing statelessness and the new challenges of war
A stateless person is someone who is not considered as a national by any state. She/he is not regarded as the citizen of any country. In practice, this means that this person will lack any form of official civil documentation. As the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness marks its 65th anniversary, Ukraine's experience reflects both decades of progress in reducing statelessness and the new challenges created by the full-scale war.
“When you don’t have any ID documents , you cannot get a job or rent a place. And when you are alone in a big city, it is very difficult. Sometimes I even had to sleep on the street,” says Serhii.
Born in Donetsk region, Serhii relocated to Kyiv after his hometown came under Russian occupation at the start of the war in eastern Ukraine. In 2017, he lost his bag with all of his identity documents. As the documents needed to confirm his identity remained in occupied territory and had not yet been digitized, proving his nationality became a five-year struggle.
Serhii’s experience is one example of how people can find themselves at risk of statelessness. For most people, citizenship is something they rarely think about. It may be reflected in a passport, appear on official documents and quietly guarantees access to rights, services and opportunities. But for stateless people and those at risk of statelessness, the absence of a nationality or the inability to prove it can shape almost every aspect of daily life – from enrolling a child in school, to seeing a doctor, finding formal work, opening a bank account, renting a place to live or even proving who they are.
In Ukraine, the reasons for statelessness are diverse. It affects people who fell through legal gaps following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, members of minority groups facing barriers to documentation, people whose births were never officially registered and, more recently, people whose legal identity has been put at risk by Russia's ongoing war, temporary occupation and displacement.
Three decades of reducing statelessness in Ukraine
For more than three decades, Ukraine has gradually strengthened its legal framework to prevent and reduce statelessness, with the support of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and its partners.
When UNHCR began working in Ukraine in 1994, it supported the return and reintegration of Crimean Tatars and their descendants after decades of forced exile, helping address barriers to documentation and citizenship. As a result, around 150,000 Crimean Tatars eventually returned to Crimea and acquired Ukrainian nationality.
One of the leading advocates for their return was Mustafa Dzhemilev, who received UNHCR's Nansen Refugee Award in 1998 in recognition of his decades-long peaceful struggle for the rights of Crimean Tatars.
Over the following years, Ukraine gradually built a stronger legal framework to prevent and resolve statelessness. In 2013, the country acceded to the two UN Statelessness Conventions: the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. In 2020, it introduced the Statelessness Determination Procedure, which gave people who are not recognized as citizens of any country a formal way to have their status recognized and obtain legal residence in Ukraine. Since then and as of June 2026, close to 1,700 people have been recognized as stateless, and 110 of them have subsequently acquired Ukrainian nationality.
During UNHCR's global ten-year #IBelong Campaign (2014–2024) which aimed to reduce statelessness, thousands of people in the world were able to find solutions and obtain recognition of their nationality or statelessness through a range of measures.
With the conclusion of the #IBelong Campaign in 2024, efforts to end statelessness entered a new phase. In October 2024, UNHCR launched the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, bringing together governments, civil society, stateless communities and other partners to build on the progress already made, share solutions and accelerate collective action to end statelessness.
New risks of statelessness amid war and practical solutions
Statelessness risks as a result of the war, temporary occupation of parts of Ukraine's territory and forced displacement started to increase in 2014, and dramatically rose with the onset of the full-scale war. Temporary occupation has left many people and relevant authorities without access to the archives of the Civil Registry system and State Migration Service, including vital personal records that were never digitized, while displacement has separated millions from the places where their identity can be verified.
This was the situation Serhii found himself in. After losing his documents, he could not access the records necessary to confirm his identity because they remained in the occupied territory.
A solution came in 2022, when the identity setting procedure became possible through a video conference, allowing undocumented people to have their identity confirmed remotely. Serhii's father joined the identity setting procedure through a video conference from the temporarily occupied territory, and with legal assistance and support from UNHCR’s partner, the Charitable Fund Right to Protection, Serhii was finally able to confirm his identity and receive a Ukrainian passport.
Preventing statelessness today
As new risks emerge, the focus is both on resolving existing cases and preventing new ones. In 2025, UNHCR and its partners provided legal assistance to over 2,700 stateless people, people with undetermined nationality and people at risk of statelessness across 15 regions of Ukraine. This resulted in people having their births registered and obtaining birth certificates, confirming their nationality and obtaining passports, being recognized as stateless and obtaining residence permits, and in some cases - acquiring Ukrainian nationality or permanent residence.
In its efforts to support the Government with digitalization of Civil Registry archives, in 2026, UNHCR provided 350 document scanners to seven interregional departments of the Ministry of Justice to help preserve and ensure unhindered access to the civil status records that are essential for proving identity and nationality.
“Ukraine has established important legal mechanisms to address statelessness and help people access personal documents, including through the statelessness determination procedure, which is truly a best practice. But, since 2014, the war creates serious risks relating to statelessness. Displacement, occupation, and lost or inaccessible records can make it hard for people to prove who they are or what their nationality is. There is still much work to do to help people find durable solutions. And this is something we can achieve by continuing to work together — government institutions, international organizations and civil society,” said Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, UNHCR Representative in Ukraine.
