THE PROBLEM OF STATELESSNESS IN UKRAINE AND THE WAYS OF ADDRESSING IT instead of a passport, the Embassy informed Tamerlan that he does not have that country’s citizenship because the nationality law adopted after Tamerlan’s forced departure did not include him in the initial body of Azerbaijan’s citizens, as he had no real estate in Azerbaijan and no family members there. A procedure to regularize his stay in the territory of Ukraine is only beginning… The story of Anastasia Suvorova Anastasia (Nastia) was born in the Russian Federation in 1992. When she was 13, her parents moved to Ukraine and took her along. In Ukraine, the family took up residence in a small Crimean town. Nastia did not live with her parents for long, because caring for a minor child seemed not in their plans at all. Her grandmother, also living in Crimea, committed to raise the girl, and soon Nastia moved to live with grandmother and lost any contact with the parents. In 2002, Anastasia graduated from a general secondary school in Yalta with a silver medal and was going to enter a state higher educational institution to study pedagogics. However, her plans were ruined when she was denied a certificate of general secondary education because she was 16 by the time of graduation and she could not obtain a passport which was required in order to obtain the certificate 13. Since he had come to Ukraine with a Russian Federation birth certificate and having consulted her grandmother, Nastia approached the Russian Federation’s Consulate in Ukraine, but was denied issuance of the Russian Federation national passport. To establish Anastasia’s Russian citizenship, a request was sent to the competent authorities at her place of birth. Their reply was stunning: Anastasia was not recognized as a Russian Federation citizen despite the annex to her birth certificate stating her Russian citizenship. Another request brought no result. As a Consulate worker explained later, Nastia’s situation was not uncommon – “… such cases are not rare owing to a complete disorder in archives”, the worker said. However, it by no means solved Nastia’s problem. Meanwhile, her grandmother died and Nastia moved to Kyiv. Fortunately, some support emerged for her through Kyrylo whom she’s been dating for over three years. Kyrylo, a Ukrainian citizen, has intentions of starting a family with Nastia; they want to register their marriage officially and then get 13 Order № 811 of the ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine of 12 December 2003 available at http://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/ laws/show/z0201-04/page The form for order of the certificates of general secondary provided in Annex 6 requires the student’s passport data 19