How to Make Telephone Calls from Ukraine

Vendors selling refill cards for cell phones in Kiev.

Using a Cellphone in Ukraine

Cell phones are very popular in Ukraine. Bring your own from America (if you're sure it has the "tri-band" functionality to work in Europe. Most don't.) Or buy an inexpensive one in Ukraine. Unlike the US and Europe, cell phones are purchased separately from any service here, so they are cheaper and have no minimum term requirements.

Whichever phone you use, you'll now need to buy a SIM card for it. (If you just use your American cell phone as is, they may charge you several dollars per minute.) SIM cards can be bought for as little as $6, which includes $5 worth of calling time. When you use that time up, you can buy more time on the same SIM card. At this time, calls to the USA with a local SIM card cost about 66 cents a minute during the peak time, and only half that at the off times.

Some of the companies that offer local SIM cards (and additional minutes to existing accounts) are: UMC, Bee-Line, Kievstar and others. We used UMC and had no problems with it.

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Making Calls for Almost Nothing -- with Skype

If you're calling the US, you can do it with Skype for about 2 cents a minute! (Compare that with $3 a minute from the hotel.) Just find high speed Internet access, plug in your headset with microphone combination and dial away. (You'll need to have, or open, a Skype account, of course.) My experience was that the call quality was often better with Skype than with an International calling card over regular a telephone. Those (regular telephones) tended to have lots of crosstalk and noise.

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