My Wife’s James Bond-like Strategy for Getting a Second Passport

Bond. 

Yulia Bond. 

Apparently, I married the female version of that famous British secret agent. 

For a while now, I’ve been writing to you about my wife’s ongoing efforts to reclaim her Ukrainian heritage and passport. Well, now she’s doubling down on that effort, and is using a bit of skullduggery to do so. 

To catch you up…my wife was born and raised in Crimea, in Ukraine, back when Ukraine was part of the former Soviet Union. She became Russian when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. She was given a Russian passport and her Ukrainian passport lapsed. 

She never gave the idea of a “second passport” much thought because she never expected to end up married to an American, living in Prague, at a time when the world is outraged that Russia has attacked her birth country and governments are looking unkindly upon those who hold Russian identity credentials. 

Suddenly, having a second passport—her original Ukrainian passport—makes a whole lot of sense. 

Stepping back for a moment, Yulia’s effort broadly reflects what a lot of people are thinking about globally these days.  

I see it in Prague regularly as I meet Brits who are fleeing the not-surprising impacts of Brexit and are pursuing passports across Europe tied to family heritage. 

Heck, as I sat down to write this dispatch, a story popped up in my newsfeed detailing the efforts of an increasing number of super-rich to ditch America because of what both political parties are doing to the country. 

The broader theme—whether it’s super-rich Americans or a super-pretty Ukrainian woman married to me—is that the world is a demonstrably more unstable place than it was a generation ago.  

Western nations are not immune to that. In fact, they’re often dead center. And in an unstable world, it’s far better to begin the second passport process as soon as possible. You might think, as Yulia did, that you will never need one. And then one day you do because everything you know as status quo has been completely upended.  

In that case, you’ll be starting the process of building a new sovereign identity from a position of weakness. 

That’s what happened to Yulia, which has led her to play the role of Yulia Bond… 

She has been in pursuit of her second passport since late spring. All of her efforts have hit a brick wall. 

She called the Ukrainian embassy in Prague to ask what she needed to do to become Ukrainian again. The phone rang forever, for days at a time. She gave up. 

She chatted to local Ukrainians in Prague she met on Facebook groups. They told her to go stand in line at the embassy. She did. The embassy told her that the line was only for refugees fleeing the war who needed immediate services. They sent her home, telling her to register her interest online. 

The online calendar, it turns out, is filled until sometime in 2023. Literally not a single date is available. Everything is booked. 

She was frustrated. 

A friend told her she might have more luck booking an appointment for her son, who is a native-born Russian but has Ukrainian heritage because of Yulia. 

That worked! 

She was able to book a date to apply for her son’s Ukrainian passport in November…which is leading to her Bondian subterfuge: She’s filling out documents for her son…and herself, and when she shows up to deliver his paperwork, she’s secretly going to slide her paperwork into the file as well.  

She has it all planned out. And she has an Ernst Blofeld gleam in her eye when she tells me about it. 

I’m hoping this works. 

She is increasingly angling to move closer to the sea, and I am leery of changing countries so long as she has just a Russian passport, given that governments are increasingly blacklisting Russian passport holders. 

I’ll let you know how this goes. I’m not sure what to expect.  

But my big takeaway is this: If ever you’ve thought about getting a second passport, start the process now.  

If demand ever explodes for whatever reason, you don’t wanna have to go all Yulia Bond in trying to find some way to make it work.