5 BALTICS / FORMER SOVIET UNION Statelessness continues to affect a significant population following the break-up of the Soviet Union, although in the domestic context the persons concerned enjoy a special legal status as “non-citizens” and “persons of undetermined citizenship” respectively. Today, a quarter of a century after dissolution and long after anyone who was already alive at the time has attained adulthood, statelessness continues to affect children in countries of the former Soviet Union. According to the most recent figures, there are 7,846 stateless children in Latvia20 and 936 in Estonia.21 Neither of these figures includes stateless children in the country whose situation is separate from these long-standing “in situ” populations, the number of whom are not known. In Ukraine, the 2001 population census recorded 17,517 children as stateless, but the overall number of persons affected by statelessness in the country has since diminished and it is not clear how many children are stateless in Ukraine today.22 Nor are statistics readily available for the number of children affected by statelessness in the Russian Federation – the last of the four states in Europe with the largest stateless populations.23 SOUTHEAST EUROPE In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, state succession also left problems of statelessness in its wake. UNHCR’s most recent statistics indicate that just over 10,000 people remain affected by or at risk of statelessness across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.24 The challenge in much of Southeast Europe revolves particularly around lack of access to documentation of birth and identity, leading to an inability to establish or confirm nationality, especially impacting on Roma communities. These problems continue to be intergenerational in their effects, nevertheless the number of children currently facing statelessness in this sub-region is not known. There has also been a spill-over of this issue in particular into Italy where many Roma migrated from the former Yugoslavia and continue to face difficulties asserting a claim to any nationality, although no overall data is available.25