The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko congratulated Ukrainians with a launch of plastic card passports, as he wrote it in his Twitter after his visit to the polygraph “Ukraine”.
New passports will be issued starting on January 1st, 2016. The cost of the new document will be about 160 hryvnias. The Ukrainian leader described the introduction of the new documents as a “farewell to the Soviet Union”.
On the front of the new passport there will be Ukrainian flag and emblem. From its left side there will be an individual photo, surname, name and patronymic, date of birth, gender, identification number, and other data.
The card will include personal electronic data in Ukrainian, and in another language by the person’s choice. The card won’t be provided for fingerprints but will indicate a marital status, as well as the reception area. It won’t be like a usual “passport stamp”: the data will be concentrated in a special chip and, for example, anyone could know without special equipment, whether a man is divorced or married.
Electronic cards will be given compulsorily only to the people under the age of 16, it will also serve as a birth certificate. In both cases, such passports are issued for free. Others can get a plastic card on request (not for free). The card has to be replaced every 10 years, as an international passport.
Similar plastic instruments operate in 90 countries. But there such cards include the information from all special services: insurance, driving license, fingerprints. Each service has an access to particular data when scanning the plastic card, so the cards are considered to be safe. Several years ago such cards were introduced in Georgia.
“It’s much more usable. For example, I can forget the card in a jeans pocket, put it in a washer, and the passport won’t go bad. It is possible to shed some coffee on it without any consequences,” says an immigrant from Germany, Olga Nekrasova.
