The most vulnerable people in terms of statelessness in former Soviet countries are members of ethnic minorities. For example, according to information from an NGO, the majority of Lezgians living in dense communities in areas of Azerbaijan bordering Dagestan were not able to exchange their Soviet passports in time (by 2005). This made it impossible for them to receive foreign passports or communicate with relatives living on the other side of the border in Dagestan.5 In another example, the ethnic clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010 had a detrimental effect on documentation. The victims of these pogroms lost not only their homes and property, but also their passports, and the archives that could have provided information to reissue documents were destroyed. Seventy percent of stateless persons in Kyrgyzstan live in the south, and the majority of these are women from Uzbekistan with expired national passports or old Soviet passports who married Kyrgyz citizens.6 The problem of these women, who have come to be known as “transborder brides,” is also typical of other postSoviet countries in Central Asia (there is an especially large number of these brides in Sughd Oblast, Tajikistan7). In Tajikistan, the majority of the 19,000 stateless persons identified by late 2015 as part of a national program supported by the UNHCR live in the south of the country (these are mainly people who fled to neighboring countries during the civil war and then returned, but do not have valid documents).8 In most former Soviet countries, the conditions and procedures under which stateless persons are offered citizenship are within the competence of a country’s domestic laws, although some countries—Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine—have acceded to the 1961 Convention on Statelessness and must take into consideration and implement generally recognized norms to identify and register stateless persons and provide them with the appropriate status. According to data from 20 years ago (the most recent census of 2001), there were 82,550 stateless people in Ukraine. The majority of them lived in the Autono- 5  Alekseyev M.E., Kazenin K.I., Suleymanov M.S. Dagestanskiye narody Azerbaidzhana. Politika, istoriia, kultura. 2008. For NGO data on these districts of dense Lezgian communities (Kusarsky and Khachmassky) see http://www.e-reading.club/ bookreader.php/88844/Alekseev,_Kazenin,_Suleiimanov_-_Dagestanskie_narody_ Azerbaiidzhana._Politika,_istoriya,_kul’tura.html 6  Kyrgyzstan: Migrant Children and Victims may Become Stateless Persons in June, June 20, 2011 http://www.fergananews.com/articles/6996, data from 2010 are cited. 7  According to the Tajik NGO Consortium Initiative (2011), these women cannot get Uzbekistan to respond to their inquiries on their loss of citizenship, which complicates their legalization in Tajikistan. http://news.tj/ru/news/nevidimye-lyudi-tsentralnoi-azii. 8  http://www.unhcr.kz/rus/news-of-the-region/news/2520/ 10