THE PROBLEM OF STATELESSNESS IN UKRAINE AND THE WAYS OF ADDRESSING IT Rights Foundation, UNHCR’s implementing partner in Ukraine, and applied to the Foundation’s lawyers for help. Now she receives free legal assistance in trying to establish ties with Tajikistan. Undergoing this stage is necessary to ascertain Anna’s affiliation with that country and to build a further strategy in the process of regularizing her stay in Ukraine and acquiring a citizenship. III. 2 Stateless persons who immigrated to Ukraine After the dissolution of the USSR, its ex-nationals kept travelling around newly formed republics. The newly formed states tried to establish legislative frameworks to the issue of crossing of their borders and crossing of other states’ borders by their citizens as soon as possible. For example, upon declaration of its independence, as mentioned previously, Ukraine entered into agreements with a number of post-Soviet republics. The agreements established a visa-free regime or a simplified procedure of border crossing by citizens of the Parties. Therewith, stateless persons, even those permanently residing in the signatory countries, were left unnoticed, i.e. they could enter other post-Soviet republics only with visas, which made their already difficult legal situation even worse. However, the problem consisted not only of the visa-free border crossing, but also of the legislation that determined the initial body of citizens of the newly formed republics. Besides, different states started issuing their passports at different times, hence the ex-USSR citizens could cross borders with the USSR citizen passports well until the state of their previous residence stopped recognizing such passports. Therefore, if the state of previous residence of the persons who have left for another state with their USSR passports adopted a new citizenship law during their absence, such persons often fell out of the initial body of citizens of the state and could not return on the basis of their USSR passports. There were also cases when such persons, entitled to citizenship of the states they had left, could not obtain new travel or identity documents at the embassies in the host countries as their ex-USSR passports became invalid. They could therefore not return to their countries of origin. So, how many stateless persons have entered Ukraine during the period of transition after the dissolution of the USSR and how many of them have stayed in the territory of Ukraine for permanent residence? Available statistics of the State Border Guard Service and the State Migration Service of Ukraine provide us with that information. According to them, 235,000 stateless persons entered Ukraine over the period from 1995 to 2013. During 2006-2012, 135,642 stateless persons have entered Ukraine 14. Of them, 76,700 persons entered 14 www.ukrstat.gov.ua 21