The Lakatosh Case as a Reflection of the Problem of Statelessness in Russia and Ukraine In January 2019, two stateless persons—Anna Lakatosh and Aladar Forkosh, Romani people from Ukraine’s Zakarpattia Oblast—appealed to ADC Memorial for assistance. Without valid identity documents that would enable them to live and work legally in Russia, Anna and Aladar are living in extreme poverty in a makeshift shack in an industrial area on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg. They are constantly subjected to threats from the police and face the risk of being detained for violating migration rules and placed in a foreign national temporary detention center, even though they cannot be expelled to any other country. These people would have become “just another client of ADC Memorial” dealing with problems typical for the Roma minority if not for one thing: both Anna Lakatosh and Aladar Forkosh were applicants in a strategic case of the European Court of Human Rights on the dramatic consequences of statelessness (2010). With assistance from an attorney and ADC Memorial experts, they were able win a large monetary award for the violation of rights recognized by the Russian Federation. How can it be that people who were once deprived of liberty for an extended period for violating migration rules and then won their case at the European Court of Human Rights have not been able to gain legal status in either Russia, their country of residence, or Ukraine, their country of origin, over the course of almost 10 years and remain in the same disenfranchised position? Anna Lakatosh and Aladar Forkosh have found themselves hostage to unresolved systemic problems in Russian and Ukrainian laws, the military conflict between the two countries, a tightening of the border, and long-standing problems of the Roma minority typical of former Soviet countries. Their fate depends on whether or not Russia and Ukraine can change laws and practices that currently violate the rights of tens of thousands of stateless people. The Case of “Lakatosh and Others v. Russia” (ECtHR, 2010) The dissolution of the Soviet Union took an enormous toll on the lives of the Roma—a minority living throughout the entire former Soviet Union. Family ties between groups f Roma, who were once separated only by the administrative borders of Soviet republics, were abruptly cut with the emergence of newly independent states and 4