Legal fictions in birth registration: linguistic manifestations and social implications of paternity attribution in Ukraine and comparative perspectives

Abstract This article offers a comprehensive legal, linguistic, sociodemographic and psychological analysis of the phenomenon of mandatory fictitious paternity in civil status registration in Ukraine, as provided for in Part 1 of Article 135 of the Family Code of Ukraine. The study critically reassesses the Soviet legal legacy, which, through the prism of conceptual metaphors of ‘structural symmetry’, forces single mothers to enter non-existent data about the father, thereby creating administratively constructed paternal identities. Using a longitudinal analysis of this phenomenon from 2008 to 2025, the author demonstrates that the number of children at risk of administrative invisibility is approaching one million. Drawing on netnographic and autoethnographic methodologies, including cases of neurodivergent children, the article reveals the attendant psychosocial risks and critical barriers to the safety and mobility of Ukrainian refugee families in foreign jurisdictions during wartime. Based on these findings, the study conceptualises a model of moving beyond Soviet-era paternalistic registration practices in favour of documentary truth, advocating the introduction of the legal institution of the matronymic at the stage of primary registration.