THE PROBLEM OF STATELESSNESS IN UKRAINE AND THE WAYS OF ADDRESSING IT The story of Tamerlan Tamerlan was born in Baku in 1965. He eagerly recalls his childhood: he was the only child in the family, his parents loved and respected him, and his school performance was excellent. However, due to the Karabakh conflict in 1994, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he had to leave Azerbaijan and came to Ukraine where he took up temporary residence in Odessa on the basis of his Soviet passport. Shortly afterwards, the flat where Tamerlan lived was ransacked by unknown persons. Together with other valuable belongings, his documents disappeared, including his 1974 template Soviet passport, driving license and birth certificate, and were never found again. Tamerlan’s attempts of having the documents renewed through the Embassy of Azerbaijan gave no result. Thus, Tamerlan became an invisible man while Ukraine turned from a refuge into a trap for him. Feeling helpless in this situation, Tamerlan repeatedly tried to cross the Ukrainian-Moldovan border but every time was stopped by border guards. Detaining him, they also took steps for his identification, but the Embassy of Azerbaijan saw no need to respond not only to Tamerlan’s requests but also to the repeated requests between 1997 and 2004 by the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine. Later in 2004, Tamerlan met Tetiana . They fell in love and started living in a common law marriage, and gave birth to their baby, Maksym, in 2006. However, along with the joy of having a baby, the family was seized by quarrels and misunderstanding: Tamerlan’s common law wife wanted him to work, provide for the family properly, and give their child all the things they needed… He tried his best – working the night shifts, doing heavy manual work – but that money was not enough. And he could not get employed officially because of his uncertain legal status. Despite the excellent relations between the father and the son, Maksym’s birth certificate has a dash in the “father” field… In the long run, the atmosphere in Tamerlan’s family became so tense that Tetiana left Tamerlan and married another man who, according to her, “will be able to secure a good future for the child”… At present, Tamerlan’s case is managed by lawyers of the Pravo na Zakhyst (Right to Protection) non-governmental organization, UNHCR’s implementing partner in Ukraine. In 2013, Tamerlan finally received a long-awaited reply from the Embassy of Azerbaijan. However, the reply did not help solve his problems: 18