Ukrainian bureaucracy is horrible. Let me tell you a little story.
To stay in the country as a volunteer for more than 90 days, you need a document called a "temporary residence permit”. However you cannot acquire one of these without first obtaining a volunteers’ visa from a Ukrainian consulate outside Ukraine - something you do not need if your visit is limited to 90 days out of 180. The nearest consulate to Lviv is in Lublin, in Poland, an eight-hour uncomfortable bus journey given the inevitable long delays at that particular border where all your luggage is searched by both sides and you are asked a series of daft questions such as "are you a soldier” and "do you have any marijuana with you.” (Marijuana is illegal in Ukraine and not grown in Ukraine - the weather is too bad.) The consulate needs a collection of obtuse documents, including an “official” health insurance policy, which basically means one issued by the government. You also need an invitation and guarantee letter from a registered NGO with the Ministry of Social Affairs, which very few Ukrainian NGO’s are by reason of the horrendous paperwork involved and the spot checks on registered NGO’s records that plague anything officially registered in Ukraine. So you have to go to a lawyer who has his or her own NGO registered solely for the purpose of issuing these letters. Then you have to walk around looking for a bank to pay the in some cases horrifically high consular fees - this depends on your nationality.
Then you re-enter Ukraine, and with the visa you can apply for the temporary residence permit. This is also a horrendous exercise in paper chasing, for which you need a lawyer again unless you want to be driven out of your wits. Thankfully Ukrainian lawyers are not very expensive, but nevertheless it is painful. You have to go to an office with a series of papers including the original (a photocopy will not do) of the NGO’s incorporation document. Then you are supposed to wait indoors for seven days, because the authorities can come round in theory at any time to check that you are actually living at the address you give. In practice this requirement is often waived; you are telephoned to go into an office and sign a piece of paper confirming that you were present when an official attended your address. Or they ring you in advance and tell you when they are coming - but not always.
Then you go to the office and pay an unusual fee, into a machine in cash because the authorities are paranoid about corruption. Ukraine has a lot of it. Then you are photographed and fingerprinted, and a few days later you get a credit card sized document and you have your one year's temporary residence permit.
To get the permit renewed, you need to have registered your address with the City Hall where you live. This is also complicated. It does not need to be the same address as you gave when you applied for your permit - any old address will do. However you have to go there with your landlord or landlady, who presents the title documents to the building you live in. This is also complicated, because that person may not have any such documentation - a lot of building ownership in Ukraine is unregistered or officially belongs to the government, a remnant of Soviet times. So you are advised to go to the City Hall with any old person who has title documents for any property, and will sign that you live there. Finding such a person can be difficult, because Ukrainians are paranoid about giving their addresses to the authorities - also a remnant of Soviet times. Also, all your male Ukrainian friends are excluded because they are either fighting on the front line or avoiding conscription. So it has to be a woman.
You are supposed to do this within 30 days of your temporary residence permit being issued, but nobody tells you that. If you miss the deadline, as I did, you are ordered out of the City Hall and back to the immigration office, to admit your guilt to an administrative offence and pay a fine. This sounds like it might not be too bad, but it is. You can find the relevant official easily enough, and in my case he told me I wouldn’t have to pay the fine because I am a volunteer assisting the military. You stand around for a couple of hours and in my case I had to come back the next day. The paperwork had been prepared, but I was then told that someone else had decided that I did have to pay the fine after all. It’s about 90 Euros - not a fortune but a lot of money for a person serving as a volunteer in Ukraine to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces and endangered civilians at his own expense. Moreover I couldn't pay the fine in cash into the machine - a different anti-corruption mechanism - and I couldn't pay with a card because they don't have any credit card terminals in the office that takes money.
Instead I was told that I could pay at any bank - something which turned out to be false. You can only pay at a state-owned bank, which of course is another nightmare. I waited about 20 minutes to pay a bill, only for the bank teller to misspell my name (difficult as it was written in Cyrillic on the residence card) and give me the receipt. The bank also keeps very strange hours, taking long lunch breaks and the like. After I had paid, I went back to the immigration office to show that I had paid the fine. Then the decision received the final signature and stamp, saying that I had made amends, and now I have to take that decision back to the City Hall to get registered. Only there was another problem - the photocopier in the immigration office didn't work, like most things in that office. So I was given a barely legible photocopy of the decision because the printer was out of ink. Who knows what the City Hall will make of this document when I present it with them. It is so faded that I can’t read it and I doubt anyone else can either. The whole process has so far taken three days of my time.
My next stop is the tax office, to receive a tax identification number. This is way out of town and everyone tells me it is a nightmare both to get there and to deal with. So I can expect a few hours more of time wasted to get a number the purpose of which is unclear and I don't know why I wasn’t issued with it when I first received the residence card. Indeed I don't understand why there are four steps in this process, all horrible (including the Consulate which looks like and may well have been an old KGB office) when instead there could be one.
Ukraine needs root-and-branch reform to its administrative structures. Every interaction with government is like this in Ukraine, which is why Ukrainians as a rule do everything they can to avoid interacting with the government. If Ukraine is serious about joining the European Union, its parliamentarians ought to start passing the necessary legislations to streamline all this Soviet-era rubbish. And then there needs to be a totally different mindset on the part of the country’s civil servants, if Ukraine is to take just the first tentative steps towards Euro-Atlantic integration.