The Document state enterprise has produced over a million biometric passports, and delays with the issuance of such documents depend on the Ukraina Printing House, where more than 600,000 applications for documents are already in the print queue, the enterprise's spokesman, Volodymyr Polischuk, has said.

"The technical production [of biometric passports] depends on the Ukraina Printing House. They will supply the equipment in January, and some time [will be required] to set it up, but the debt has accumulated there. As far as I know, they already had over 600,000 in the print queue, but they have the exact statistics on the number of passports," he told Interfax-Ukraine on Monday, December 18.

At the same time, according to him, the Document enterprise "produced more than a million biometric passports."

He drew attention to the fact that the situation with delays was recorded in the whole of Ukraine, including at the Document state enterprise, the units of the State Migration Service and the centers for the provision of administrative services.

"Everyone is warned that now urgent [passport production] now takes a month instead of seven days, and not urgent one – two or three months instead of 20 days."

Speaking about general statistics, Polischuk noted that "the Interior Ministry has recently posted statistics that almost four million biometric passports were made over this period, and only less than 10% of these passports were used."

"We produce about a third," he added.

According to the Ukraina Printing House, it has reached the production capacity of over 300,000 biometric passports per month since July, but the maximum figure was 322,700 in October this year. About 315,000 were produced each in August, September and November, and 142,900 in the first two weeks of December.

Over the year, customers received 3.053 million biometric passports from the printing house. Particular, about 100,000, or about 3% monthly, were transferred to the Foreign Ministry and the rest to the State Migration Service.