Citizenship and the passport after years abroad: where you stand on the ladder

The question arrives in different forms: “my passport expired — am I still a citizen?”, “I left in the nineties — what am I now?”, “my children were born here — are they Ukrainian?”. The forms differ, but the ladder is one, and it pays to find your own rung on it before planning a trip, an inheritance, or a second citizenship.

This is not legal advice. Citizenship decisions are made by the consulate and the State Migration Service, and complicated cases are worth walking through with a lawyer.

The master rule everything follows from

A passport is a document. Citizenship is a status. They live separately.

An expired, lost, or never-issued passport does not end citizenship. Loss of Ukrainian citizenship is a separate state procedure, formalised by decree; it does not happen by itself — not from time passing, not from moving away, not from receiving another passport. So a person who left as a Ukrainian citizen almost always still is one, until the formal renunciation procedure has been completed.

Every rung below follows from this rule.

The passport expired recently

The simplest case: you are a citizen; the document just needs renewing. Abroad that is done through the consulate or the foreign offices of the state passport service (the “Document” enterprise) in a number of cities; the queues are long, so start early. What an expired passport means for a trip to Ukraine — transit, getting back out — is covered in the travel guide.

The passport expired long ago — or was never exchanged

You left in the nineties or the two-thousands, the passport has long been invalid, or the drawer holds a Soviet-era document or an old-style Ukrainian one. Your status most likely has not changed: if you belonged to Ukrainian citizenship (including under the 1991 law, as a person resident in Ukraine at independence), it is still yours until renunciation is formalised.

The practical difference is only that, before issuing a new passport, the consulate will run a verification of belonging to Ukrainian citizenship — confirming you are that person and that you are a citizen. Everything that documents your link to Ukraine helps here: the old passport (even invalid), the birth certificate, residence-registration records. If the papers are lost, fresh duplicates can be obtained from abroad, and for truly old records there are the archives.

It is slower than an ordinary renewal, but it is a well-trodden procedure, not a dead end.

A second citizenship: a question with two halves

This is where the most confusion lives, because the answer has two independent parts:

• What Ukraine says — and this changed on 16 January 2026, when the law on multiple citizenship (Law 4502-IX) came into force. The next section sets out what it actually does. It is new law, and the Cabinet’s list under it has already been amended three times — so treat what follows as the structure, and take today’s position from the State Migration Service and your consulate.
• What your country says. Whether it permits dual citizenship at naturalisation is a question of ITS law, and the answers vary: some have long allowed it, some forbid it, and some changed their rules recently. The authority is your country’s naturalisation body — which is exactly why we publish no by-country table: it would go stale faster than it could be read.

What the 2026 law changed — the structure

The Law on Citizenship, as amended, now works like this:

• In any dealings with Ukraine, a person holding Ukrainian citizenship is treated only as a Ukrainian citizen (art. 2) — the rule that governs the border, the consulate, and the men-18–60 rules. That did not change.
• The Cabinet keeps a list of states whose citizens may acquire Ukrainian citizenship under a simplified procedure (art. 10-1), drawn up with regard to EU membership and sanctions against the aggressor. Resolution No. 1412 of 5 November 2025, as amended in May and June 2026, names 34 states (checked 22 August 2026): Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Not on it, as of that date: Australia, Israel, Türkiye, Argentina, Brazil, Georgia, and everywhere else. The live list is the resolution itself — it has moved three times in eight months.
• Acquiring the citizenship of a listed state is now a recognised case of multiple citizenship (art. 5-1) and is not a ground for losing Ukrainian citizenship. A Ukrainian who naturalises in the US, Canada, the UK or a listed EU state keeps both, as far as Ukraine is concerned.
• Voluntarily acquiring the citizenship of a non-listed state, as an adult, is a ground for loss (art. 19) — as is, separately, acquiring the citizenship of the aggressor state. “Voluntary” means you applied for it. Two things soften this in practice: loss is still a procedure completed by presidential decree, not an automatic event — until the decree, you are a citizen with all rights and duties (art. 20); and the law lists cases that do not count as voluntary acquisition, including a child’s citizenship by birth and citizenship that attaches automatically by marriage.
• The mirror side for foreigners from listed states: they may take Ukrainian citizenship by filing a declaration recognising themselves as a Ukrainian citizen instead of an undertaking to renounce their existing one. People who earlier took Ukrainian citizenship and signed such an undertaking for a listed state’s citizenship can now file the declaration instead — a question for the Migration Service.

What this means for the people who read this page: if you left as a Ukrainian citizen and have since naturalised in a listed state, the 2026 law removed the main legal cloud over you — but it did not remove the border rule, the consular rules or the military-registration rules, because in Ukraine’s eyes you are Ukrainian. If you naturalised in a non-listed state, do not assume anything happened to your citizenship either way: a ground for loss is not a loss, and the honest move is to ask the consulate where you stand.

One thing that is stable and matters for travel: at the Ukrainian border a Ukrainian citizen is Ukrainian, whatever second passport they hold. Details in the travel guide.

And the mirror procedure exists: renunciation of Ukrainian citizenship — formal, through the consulate, completed by decree, and slow. It is needed by those whose country requires giving up the old citizenship at naturalisation; start it well in advance.

Children born abroad

Two different situations, and mixing them up means taking the wrong road:

• At the moment of the child’s birth, at least one parent was a Ukrainian citizen. Then the child is a Ukrainian citizen by descent, from birth. This is not “a right to apply someday”; it is a status that already exists, and it is documented through the consulate (birth registration, the certificate, later a passport). Many parents do not realise their US- or German-born children are already Ukrainian. There is also an adult conversation in here: with the status, in time, come a citizen’s rules — including those that apply to men aged 18–60 under martial law. Whether to document it is the family’s decision; knowing the status already exists is worth it either way.
• The parents lost Ukrainian citizenship BEFORE the child was born (or never held it — the older waves of the diaspora). Then the child is not a citizen by birth, and the route is acquisition by territorial origin through ancestors — the separate process covered in the citizenship-by-descent guide.

Which of the two cases is yours turns on a single fact: was either parent a Ukrainian citizen on the day the child was born. If in doubt (you left long ago, the status was uncertain), that is the same verification-of-belonging question this page started from.

Where to check

Citizenship questions are decided by the consulate and the Migration Service; passports are issued by the same institutions. We deliberately publish no fees and no timelines — they change; take them from the official pages on the day you apply. If something here has gone out of date, tell us.