Refusals of Ukrainian residence applications are rarely dramatic. Almost nobody is turned away because the state objects to them living in Kyiv. They are turned away because a translation was attached to a passport that has since been renewed, because a document was apostilled after it was notarised instead of before, or because the fifteenth working day before the end of the permitted stay fell on a public holiday nobody had counted. The migration file is a chain, and chains fail at their weakest link rather than in the middle.