from the Ukrainian consulate. Even though the practice of the Ukrainian consulate in Russia is to send the corresponding request to Ukraine’s State Migration Service, as noted above, the State Migration Service has stopped operating in non-government controlled territories and cannot confirm the Ukrainian citizenship of applicants. In Resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe 2198 (2018) “Humanitarian Consequences of the War in Ukraine,” the Assembly called on the Ukrainian government to develop a mechanism for guaranteeing the rights of citizens who left Ukraine after the start of the war in 2014 and to devote special attention to ensuring that they do not risk loss of citizenship.28 In spite of this, this problem is still of vital importance and requires state regulation. Registration of Children Born in Non-Government Controlled Areas Regulation of the legal status of children born on territories not controlled by Ukraine is still fraught with problems. The form providing medical evidence of birth issued in non-government controlled territories is not recognized by vital statistics offices of Ukraine. In 2018, the government adopted a law under which documents confirming the fact of birth in temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are recognized as valid.29 So far, however, the provisions of this law have not been implemented in administrative laws. To receive a birth certificate for a child born in temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, parents must now obtain a document from those territories confirming the fact of the child’s birth. If they receive a written refusal to register the birth after submitting this document to any vital statistics office in a territory under Ukrainian control, they must file an application with a court to establish the fact of the child’s birth. Obviously, few parents (or other representatives of the child) have the physical or financial ability to travel to a controlled territory to go through all the abovementioned steps to obtain a Ukrainian certificate of birth. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that only 43 percent of children born in non-government controlled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts obtained 28 Resolution 2098 (2018) Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe “Humanitarian Consequences of the War in Ukraine,” http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/ XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=24432&lang=en 29 Law of Ukraine “On Special State Policies to Ensure Ukraine’s State Sovereignty in Temporarily Occupied Territories in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts,” January 18, 2018, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2268-19/print 16

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