THE PROBLEM OF STATELESSNESS IN UKRAINE AND THE WAYS OF ADDRESSING IT married in a church. However, since Nastia has no passport, it is currently impossible: all civil registration offices refuse marriage registration to the couple. Nastia is quite distressed about that. Besides, she wants to study very much and does not stop cherishing the dream that she will be able to enter the department of pedagogics one day. As a matter of fact, she is currently a non-matriculated student at one of the Ukrainian universities, studying diligently, attending lectures, and being friends with other students there. One can by no means tell her apart from a usual student – if it weren’t for her status… At present, Nastia’s situation is addressed by lawyers of the Pravo na Zakhyst (Right to Protection) non-governmental organization, UNHCR’s implementing partner in Ukraine. Time will show whether Nastia manages to overcome difficulties of the bureaucratic system and finally regularize her stay and obtain nationality and identity documents. The story of Anna Valeriivna and Oleksii Anna Valeriivna was born in Dushanbe in 1970. At the age of 21, she gave birth to her son, Oleksii. Although she had to bring her son up by herself, Anna Valeriivna thought her family was happy and planned a lot for the future. However, soon after Oleksii turned 2, a civil war began in Tajikistan. Concerned about her son’s future, Anna started looking for a safe place to wait out the difficult times. The family moved to Belarus where Anna and her son lived until 1997, and then to Ukraine where they took up residence in Crimea and lived on the basis of a temporary permission to stay in Ukraine. In the same year, an unexpected thing happened – Anna lost her 1974 template Soviet passport. She filed a complaint with the police immediately, but the document was never found. The young woman even attempted to renew the passport through the Consulate but the procedure stalled, perhaps due to the civil war in Tajikistan, still underway in 1997, and she never managed to renew the document. Besides, her son was growing up, and the single woman had to apply exceptional efforts to care for him – work unofficially, sometimes at several jobs, pay for housing, buy food… She did not return to Tajikistan, first of all because she had no documents and, secondly, because Ukraine became her home, her second Motherland where she found friends and where her son grew up. In 2012, when Oleksii already reached adulthood, Anna found out about the Spryiannia Human 20