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The original was posted on /r/ukraine by /u/Arom123 on 2025-07-11 18:56:23+00:00.
Let's take a break from war posting to discuss everyone's favorite way to waste time: navigating Ukrainian government bureaucracy. And like Ukrainian bureaucracy, this post is long and annoying and could easily be half the size it actually is, but I am mad and frustrated so I will rant a little.
I am a foreigner living in Ukraine, I am married to a Ukrainian woman and have a residency permit. She just gave birth to our daughter in Lviv. We are going through the process to register her and get a birth certificate. We have an issue with how the family affairs office is assigning her patronymic. For the sake of this post I will pretend my name is Andrew, it's not true but it works well to explain the issue.
When my passport is officially translated, it says something like Ендрю. The Ukrainian "version" of my name is Андрій. Everyone knows this, it's clear that these are the same names, just in different cultures. We want her patronymic to be based off Андрій because it sounds normal and flows really well with her first name. I assumed this wouldn't be an issue because, you know, it's our child and not the Ukrainian government's child, so we should be able to choose what her name is, and we are not asking for a completely different patronymic or a non-patronymic middle name.
However the family affairs office insists that her patronymic must use my name as it appears in my translated passport (Ендрю). It wouldn't be so bad if they would let us use something like Ендрївна. But they insist her patronymic must be my entire first name, with the suffix -ївна.
Ендрюївна sounds a little ridiculous in our opinion, I think this is the kind of thing a child might be made fun of for in school .-. they said we could also just omit the patronymic entirely and she would only have a first and last name on her Ukrainian documents. This is bullshit in my opinion, I like the idea of her having a traditional Ukrainian name with a patronymic, we don't do this in my own country so it is an interesting cultural connection for me and her. My wife's father's name is Андрій, so it would also be cute if our daughter had the same patronymic as her mother. On her citizenship documents for my own country, we can pick whatever middle name we want so of course she will have Andriivna, it would be kind of funny if her "true" traditional Ukrainian name was only on her non-Ukrainian documents. But mostly I am just frustrated that something that doesn't really matter to the Ukrainian Government (it's just a way to identify her to them), but really matters a lot to the parents, is being strictly kept out of our control.
Is there anyway I, as the father, can write some kind of document authorizing this specific patronymic? Would getting a lawyer involved help at all? It is hard for me to just accept that we can't name our child how we want.
