My Wife’s Second Passport Mission to Warsaw, Poland

Warsaw in the winter. I can already feel the frostbite. 

But that’s where we’re now headed in my wife’s ongoing quest to re-establish her Ukrainian heritage and secure a much-desired second passport. 

And she’s not the only one talking second passports with me. My landlord, Peter, stopped by earlier this week and we chatted about him recently applying for Czech permanent residency (he’s Slovak). Early next year, he expects to start that process as well in the U.K., where he attended university and where he spends a great deal of time since he works on oil rigs off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea. Both those residency options, he hopes, will lead him in time to new passports. 

Suddenly, it seems, second passports are all the rage—the new status symbol among the uber-wealthy and the average citizen alike. 

Not hard to understand why, really. 

The world is in the worst shape I’ve seen in my nearly 57 years. The fog of war (potentially nuclear) threatens Europe. The United Kingdom, in its post-Brexit reincarnation, has become something of a basket case, yet others on the continent see their own potential separation from the European Union as a wise path forward. 

Ultra-right-wing political beliefs are ripping at the edges of the EU, while a decidedly divisive blue-red split has segmented America into hate-fueled cliques. During the mid-term elections last week, a couple of counties in left-leaning Oregon voted to join right-wing Idaho…while right-wing San Bernardino County, California voted to start the process of seceding to form its own state, possibly to be named Empire. 

And to top it off, we have rumblings of a global recession…the U.S. and China heading toward a game of geopolitical chicken/war in Taiwan…and we have fiat currencies all over the Western world that are so burdened by debt that many central banks are racing to load up on gold for fear that a financial crisis of biblical proportions could very well rock the foundations of the global monetary system. (Global gold demand is up 28% so far this year to its highest levels since the Great Recession, mainly driven by central banks.) 

People increasingly want to put a Plan B in place—an escape route to help them navigate and survive whatever crisis arises. A very big part of that lies in answering the most fundamental question of all: Where will I live if I can’t live where I am? Or phrased more optimistically: Where do I want to pursue better opportunities for myself and my family? 

A second passport, which implies citizenship in a country other than the one in which you were born, is the path toward those answers. 

To catch you up with what’s going on with my wife, Yulia, and her effort at answering those questions in her own life: She is Soviet by birth (born in 1982 in Crimea, in the USSR’s Ukrainian territory), she became Ukrainian in 1991 when Ukraine emerged as an independent nation after the fall of the Soviet Union, and then she became Russian when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. 

Now she’s rightly worried that she’s turning into persona non grata as European countries either ban Russian passport holders or talk of doing so. In the wrong situation, she could find herself with just a single option: Return to Russia, a country that will be a pariah for years to come, if not a generation.  

She’s lucky to the degree that she’s married to an American and has a Czech long-term residence visa. But that visa is not permanent; the Czech Republic could revoke it or decide not to renew it for whatever reason (I doubt that would happen, but it’s not an impossibility). Or she and I could decide we want to move somewhere else in Europe or in the world, which we are considering, and her Russian passport could cause problems in that process. 

Thing is, she has all the documents needed to reclaim her Ukrainian heritage (thanks to a James Bondian move by her mom in Crimea to get the documents out of the country secretly and to Yulia in Prague).  

But trying to deal with the Ukrainian embassy here in Prague has been challenging.  

She has been told by the local Ukrainian community that the process is easier at the embassy in Warsaw, a seven-hour drive from Prague. 

And, so, we’re driving to the Polish capital later this month so that she can apply for a new Ukrainian passport there. I’m hoping the tales of easiness are true. 

But I know the challenges she has been dealing with, and I fully understand her desires. They’re the same desires I have. One of my top priorities is to secure a European Union passport. 

I want options beyond those afforded me by my U.S. passport. Solid as that passport is, it comes packaged with a lot of social, political, cultural, and fiscal handicaps that have the power—however slight—to render it a less valuable document. 

The world is not a stable place these days. My home country is not as stable as it once was. Yulia’s home country most assuredly is not. 

A second passport is suddenly more important than it ever was.