In our companion piece on international IVF and surrogacy, we walked through the cost-versus-risk landscape across half a dozen countries. This is the on-the-ground version of one of those journeys — a US family from the southeast who completed their surrogacy in Kyiv during the war, with a healthy baby and a long, complicated set of logistics on either side of the delivery.
Names, agency, and clinic are anonymized. Costs are real. The family agreed to share their experience because the published industry summaries about wartime Ukrainian surrogacy don't convey what the actual day-to-day looks like — and because, in their words, "we wanted to know more than the brochure when we started, and we couldn't find it."
Why Ukraine
Two reasons. The first was cost. Their total bill — IVF cycle, agency fee, surrogate compensation, prenatal care, delivery, embassy-side paperwork, exit logistics — came to roughly $80,000 USD. A comparable US journey would have been $130,000 to $200,000+, and they had no insurance coverage that touched the surrogacy side.
The second reason was language and trust. The intended father is a native Russian speaker. A close family member had used the same Kyiv-based agency for IVF and surrogacy several years earlier with a healthy outcome. The combination — a known agency contact, a partner who could communicate with the medical team in their first language, and a documented prior journey — made Ukraine the path with the highest perceived signal of trustworthiness, even with the war factored in.
The arrival: Warsaw, Lviv, Kyiv
Air travel into Ukraine has been closed since February 2022. The functioning route in (and out) for foreign intended parents is overland through Poland.
The family flew into Warsaw, took a train to Lviv, and a second train east to Kyiv. They arrived in Kyiv roughly four weeks before the surrogate's expected delivery date — the standard agency timeline for being on the ground for the final stretch of pregnancy, the medical handoff, and the post-birth paperwork.
The intended mother's mother-in-law came with them. The family describes her presence as non-negotiable — a second pair of hands, an additional caregiver for the baby once the baby arrived, and someone who could stay with the surrogate or run logistics when the intended parents had to be elsewhere. International surrogacy in a foreign-language environment is, in their telling, a two-person job at minimum and often a three-person job.
Life in Kyiv: closer to ordinary than expected
The family's apartment was, in their words, luxurious — far nicer than what they had at home. The cost of accommodations in Kyiv during wartime is meaningfully lower than prewar; Western intended parents can rent furnished apartments at low cost in the same neighborhoods as the country's leadership and embassies.
Their building was a few minutes' walk from the Capitol complex and the parliamentary buildings. Daytime life was closer to ordinary than they had expected: stores were open, restaurants operating normally, traffic moving, public transit running. The reminders that this was wartime were specific and sharp — air-raid sirens, occasional late-evening drone activity over the city, conversations that always eventually returned to the war — but the sirens occurred less often than people imagine before they go, and Kyiv had built routines around them.
When the sirens sounded during the day, public spaces had clear protocols. The apartment building had a designated shelter level. Most of the time, the family went about their day. This is the part of the experience that surprises Western visitors most — the gap between the wartime presented in international news and the wartime experienced day-to-day in the cities not on the front line.
The delivery
The baby came early. The surrogate developed complications that required an emergent Caesarean section. During the C-section, the surrogate also underwent a hysterectomy.
A detail the family asked us to include precisely: the surrogate had wanted a hysterectomy regardless. She had completed her own family, the procedure was a decision she had been considering, and it was performed with her clear consent. That doesn't make the recovery easier — major surgery is major surgery, and it ended her ability to carry a future pregnancy — but it shapes how the family talks about the outcome. Their gratitude toward her is, they would tell you, a permanent feature of their lives.
The baby was healthy. He still is.
Lviv: the weeks no one warns you about
After the delivery, the family relocated west to Lviv. There were two reasons. First, Lviv is closer to the Polish border, and once the baby could travel, the exit route would start there. Second, and just as importantly, the post-birth paperwork takes time, and Lviv was the practical staging point.
They stayed in Lviv for several weeks with the baby. This is the part of international surrogacy that travel itineraries never mention. The clinic's job ends at delivery. The intended parents' job — to physically and legally bring their child home — begins there, in a foreign country, with paperwork.
The embassy: CRBA, birth certificate, passport
The agency coordinated directly with the US Embassy on every piece of the citizenship and exit process. This part is invisible in most public discussions of international surrogacy and is, in the family's telling, the single most important reason to use an established agency rather than do this independently.
The work the agency handled, jointly with the embassy:
- The Ukrainian birth certificate — including the genetic-parents naming convention that Ukrainian law allows for surrogacy.
- Translation and apostille of the birth certificate.
- The Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA) — the document that establishes the baby's US citizenship at birth, since at least one US-citizen parent was the genetic parent.
- DNA testing where the embassy required it — standard practice for surrogacy births to confirm the genetic relationship.
- The baby's US passport.
- Coordination with Ukrainian and Polish border authorities for exit.
The CRBA process alone can take 4 to 12 weeks in routine peacetime cases. In their case it was on the faster end of that range — but four weeks of waiting in Lviv with a newborn, with no clear date on when the paperwork would come through, was its own kind of test.
The exit: by train
When the paperwork was complete, the family traveled from Lviv to Warsaw by train, then flew home from Warsaw.
They bought the entire train car. This is uncommon but not exotic — Ukrainian rail offers the option, and for families with medical needs or specific privacy requirements, it is often the more practical route. They needed it for two reasons: the intended mother had medical considerations that required reliable space and access to a private bathroom for the duration of the trip, and a newborn changes the calculus of being in a public train car for many hours.
The trains are not air-conditioned. The trip was hot and uncomfortable. They made it.
The cost
The all-in number, including everything: roughly $80,000 USD.
Where it broke down, approximately:
- Agency fee + surrogate compensation — most of the total.
- IVF cycle, embryo creation, transfer.
- Surrogate's prenatal care and delivery.
- Apartment for several weeks in Kyiv plus several more in Lviv.
- Embassy fees, document translations, DNA testing.
- Travel: international flights, multiple train trips, the bought-out train car.
- Three adults' living costs for roughly two months.
Compared to the US journey breakdown in our domestic surrogacy article — where similar items can total $130,000 to $200,000+ — the savings are real and large. The trade-offs are also real: travel risk, war risk, the legal and paperwork chain that has to hold across two governments, and the limits on what kind of family is eligible (Ukrainian law currently restricts foreign-IP commercial surrogacy to married heterosexual couples with documented medical inability to carry).
What this family wishes they had known
Three things, when asked.
- The post-birth waiting period in Lviv (or wherever you stage your exit) needs its own line in the planning. Not as a contingency — as the default. Plan for several weeks of being in a foreign country with a newborn and incomplete paperwork.
- The mother-in-law's presence — a third adult with permanent legal status to enter and exit the country with the family — was logistically important in ways they had not predicted. International surrogacy with a single intended parent or two-adult families is harder than the brochures suggest.
- The embassy coordination is the most important single thing the agency did, and it is the part that an inexperienced or poorly-connected agency would do worst. If you are evaluating agencies, the questions to ask are about the embassy relationship, the document chain, and the average CRBA-to-exit timeline in their last 12 months. Not the marketing copy.
A note on framing
This is one family's journey. It is not a recommendation for or against wartime Ukrainian surrogacy as a category. The risks — to the surrogate, to the intended parents, to the timeline, to the legal framework — are real. The decision belongs to each family. What we can say with confidence is that the on-the-ground experience of completing a surrogacy in Kyiv has been more workable than international news coverage tends to imply, and more demanding than the agency websites tend to show.
The baby is home, healthy, and growing. The surrogate is recovered. The family's gratitude is, in their words, the through-line of the whole experience.