False alarm: Russians living abroad will receive passports without necessity to visit homeland

Yelena Ivanova

A new procedure for issuing foreign passports came into force yesterday. Passports are becoming more and more biometric, so citizens need to be fingerprinted to issue them. In order for the state to be sure that the owners of the red books are the legal owners of the document, the Russians will pay for a passport not 2 thousand rubles, as it was before, but as much as five, although the opportunity to get an old-style passport also remains. As statistics show, for many fellow citizens, new expenses will go unnoticed. 70% of Russians simply do not have passports. With the current falling income levels and rising prices, it is unlikely that the number of people wishing to go on vacation or go abroad will greatly increase. Another novelty is that a passport can be ordered through State Services. Otherwise, everything is as it was. You will have to wait a month for a new passport if you register at the place of residence, or three months if in another region.

Russian citizens living abroad had to worry. The order was silent about how this category of citizens would often receive a single document. The commentators immediately began to tell that the issue of passports at consulates and embassies had come to an end, and everyone would have to go home and wait a whole month until the native state prints the cherished book. Not only that, according to very rough estimates , over 10 million people live abroad, according to 2017 data. For 2020, the numbers on emigration did not change due to the pandemic, but there are definitely no fewer Russians living outside the country. By the way, Russia is in third place in terms of the number of emigrants after one and a half billion India, from where 16.6 million people left, and Mexico, which gives the United States the largest influx of foreigners. Russia, with 10.7 million, has overtaken even China. In total, Russians make up 4% of all migrants on Earth.

It is only natural that people living outside their homeland became agitated. There are some of them who cannot return to Russia for political reasons. If they cannot get their passports at the embassies or consulates, then it may happen that they will not have any passport.

During the pandemic, some of the people who had permanent residence or green cards were forced to stay in Russia. As a result, some of them lost the right to permanently live outside the borders of their homeland and for a long time and painfully restored documents. For them, the likelihood of being stuck in their homeland was already a reality, so no one wants to repeat such a headache.

For two months since the publication of the new procedure for issuing passports, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was silent, as if the department had nothing to do with this situation. The day before the order began, even the government-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta wrote that they would issue passports... only in Russia.

The mouthpiece of the Russian authorities, RIA Novosti, also wrote the day before the new order:

"Russians living abroad, in order to obtain a passport on the territory of Russia, need to contact" the migration department in person or in the form of an electronic document using the Single Portal or through a multifunctional center"

Lawyer Sergey Badamshin explained that if citizens live abroad, this order does not affect them, since the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is engaged in the provision of this service.

Finally, the Foreign Ministry also commented on the new regulations. Official representative Maria Zakharova told TASS:

"The reports that appeared in the media about the allegedly adopted changes of this order do not correspond to reality and are caused by insufficiently careful study of the new administrative regulations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia on the provision of state services for issuing foreign passports in the territory of the Russian Federation, which will enter into force on May 30, 2021".

That is, citizens and journalists are to blame, they do not know how to read and do not understand anything. It is only incomprehensible why it was impossible to say about this not a day before the entry into force of the order, but at least a month earlier. Then there would be no excitement.

In general, there are no special changes in the rules, so routine! And you citizens were worried. Only the communication of Russians with a kindred state is not always so peaceful, and an example of this is innumerable.