Ukrainian Name Transliteration (Passport Standard)

The rules that trip people up

Most letters have one Latin equivalent, but five depend on where they stand. Є, Ї, Й, Ю and Я are written with a Y at the start of a word (Yevhen, Yizhakevych, Yosyp, Yurii, Yaroslav) and with an I anywhere else (Haievych, Kadyivka, Andrii, Koriukivka, Nataliia). That is why Ukrainian passports show double vowels such as "ii" and "iia" that look like typing errors to English speakers. The combination зг is written zgh, so it is not mistaken for ж (zh): Згурський is Zghurskyi. The soft sign (ь) and the apostrophe are left out: Знам'янка is Znamianka.

Г is H, not G, in Ukrainian: Hryhorii, Kharkiv, Uzhhorod. Ґ, a separate letter, is G. И is Y and І is I, so Михайло is Mykhailo.

Ukrainian spelling versus Russian-style spelling

Many Ukrainians born before 1991, or whose earlier documents were issued in Russian, have names on record in two forms: Олексій (Oleksii) and Алексей (Aleksei), or Харків (Kharkiv) and Харьков (Kharkov). Neither table is wrong; they transliterate different spellings. The Russian ICAO table is in our Russian passport transliteration tool.

Names in a certified translation

The table is the default, not the last word. When we translate a birth or marriage certificate, we spell every name the way it appears in the person's passport, even if the passport uses an older or different spelling, because a US officer will compare the translation with the passport. If there is no passport, or the people on the document have none, we use the 2010 table and keep that spelling across the whole set of documents. Tell us the passport spellings when you order; it saves a round of corrections. See our guides on name spellings and on USCIS translation requirements.

Places

The same table applies to place names: Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv, Bila Tserkva. On a translation of an older Soviet document, a place is translated from the language the document is written in, so a Russian-language record from Kharkov is translated as Kharkov, with Kharkiv in a translator's note where that helps the reader.