This is the official system of Ukraine, also employed by the United Nations and many countries' foreign services. It is currently widely used to represent Ukrainian geographic names, which were almost exclusively romanized from Russian before Ukraine's independence in 1991, and for personal names in passports.
It is based on English orthography, and requires only
ASCII characters with no diacritics. It can be considered a variant of the "modified Library of Congress system", but does not simplify the -ий and -ій endings.
Its first version was codified in Decision No. 9 of the Ukrainian Committee on Issues of Legal Terminology on April 19, 1996,
[21][22] stating that the system is
binding for the transliteration of Ukrainian names in English in legislative and official acts.
A new official system was introduced for transliteration of Ukrainian personal names in
Ukrainian passports in 2007.
An updated 2010 version became the system used for transliterating all proper names and was approved as Resolution 55 of the
Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, January 27, 2010.
[23][24] This modified earlier laws and brought together a unified system for official documents, publication of cartographic works, signs and indicators of inhabited localities, streets, stops, subway stations, etc.
It has been adopted internationally. The 27th session of the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names (
UNGEGN) held in New York 30 July and 10 August 2012 after a report by the State Agency of Land Resources of Ukraine (now known as Derzhheokadastr: Ukraine State Service of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre) experts
[25] approved the Ukrainian system of romanization.
[26] The BGN/PCGN jointly adopted the system in 2019.
[27]
Official geographic names are romanized directly from the original Ukrainian and not translated. For example,
Kyivska oblast not
Kyiv Oblast,
Pivnichnokrymskyi kanal not
North Crimean Canal.
[28]