What is the position on residence documents under martial law?
+
Expired residence cards remain valid while martial law is in place, and for thirty days afterwards. It is a specific accommodation for a specific situation, and it is one of the few pieces of Ukrainian administrative law with a defined end date attached to something nobody can schedule.
Which land routes do people actually use?
+
The Polish crossings carry the greatest volume, with Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova taking the rest. Rail services run from Poland into Ukraine and are the most-used route for those travelling for essential reasons — a train rather than a flight is the realistic form of an arrival.
How would I leave the country?
+
By the same land routes, in reverse, and the timing is far less predictable than a departure gate. Queues at the crossings vary enormously. A journey planned around a connecting flight from Kraków or Warsaw needs a margin measured in days rather than hours.
Does the ninety-day count still run normally?
+
The rule is unchanged: ninety days in any 180-day period. What differs is how the entries and exits are recorded, at land crossings under wartime conditions rather than at airports. Keeping your own record of the dates is worth more here than usual.
The guidance addresses residence rather than insurance for ordinary visitors, so this is a question to put to the current official source rather than to infer. What is certain is that ordinary travel insurance does not cover travel against government advice, which is the more practical point.
What about the occupied areas?
+
The crossings into the occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson, and into Crimea, are closed. Entering those territories other than through Ukrainian-controlled crossings carries consequences under Ukrainian law, and the FCDO advice against travel is at its strongest there.
Who decides at the border?
+
The State Border Guard Service, at the western land crossings. Its checks are documentary and conducted under conditions that no ordinary description of a border captures — the process is functioning, but it is functioning in wartime.
Is there a curfew to plan around?
+
Movement restrictions apply and vary by region and by circumstance. They are not an entry requirement but they shape any journey once inside, and they are precisely the kind of detail that changes without notice. The current official advice is the only reliable source for them.
Would an onward ticket from Poland be useful evidence?
+
It would be evidence of your means and your plans, which is what the border is actually assessing. It also happens to be honest, in a way that a fabricated Ukrainian departure would not be, because it describes a journey that genuinely exists.
How does this page differ from the others here?
+
In that the entry rules are the least important thing on it. For every other country, the requirements are the question. Here the requirements are straightforward and the question is whether to travel at all — which is not one a booking document has any part in answering.
What is the one thing to do before travelling?
+
Read the current FCDO advice for Ukraine on the day you are deciding, not this page. It is updated as the situation changes; nothing written in advance can be. That is the whole of the responsible answer.
