| It won’t be easy for Ukrainians to become “friends” in Russia President Putin’s promises to simplify the regime of entry and stay in Russia for Ukrainian citizens starting in the New Year, which he made on Tuesday in Kyiv, did not cause any reaction yesterday in Russian bureaucratic circles, which in theory will have to put these promises into practice. Representatives of absolutely all departments involved in ensuring registration and passport control in Russia, to whom our correspondents turned for comment, unanimously replied that they had not heard anything about this yet.
Apparently, there will be no problems with the introduction of a procedure allowing citizens of Ukraine to enter Russia not with foreign, but with “internal” passports. “We have not yet received any relevant documents, and if the government makes changes to the law, we will comply,” the Federal Border Service of the FSB of the Russian Federation said yesterday. - We are all for it. We have been preparing similar documents for a long time, especially on simplifying passport control for residents of the border zone. After all, in recent years, it’s no secret, the situation on some sections of the border has reached the point of absurdity. When state borders were drawn between Russia and Ukraine, many close relatives became residents of different states, and it is clear that the need to obtain a foreign passport just to visit relatives did not please anyone.” The Federal Migration Service (FMS) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation reacted just as calmly to this matter. As Deputy Director of the FMS Mikhail Tyulkin said, their employees are ready to accept for execution any documents that the government offers them.
However, the idea voiced by the president to allow Ukrainians to stay in Russia for three months without registration - just like Russians are now in Ukraine - turned out to be much more difficult. The fact is that registration rules in Russia are much stricter, not only for foreigners, but also for their own citizens. According to the law, residents of the Russian Federation can stay in any “not their own” city in the country without registering for only ten days (in Moscow the period is generally reduced to three days); foreigners are required to register within three days. That is, it turns out that guests from Ukraine will find themselves in a more privileged position than the Russians themselves. In this regard, none of the officials dared to officially comment yesterday on how such an idea could be implemented. Only at the Moscow UVIR one of the employees privately suggested that perhaps the government was preparing a general package of amendments to laws and other regulations in general regarding the registration procedure. And Vladimir Putin probably did not go into details, but cited one of the possible options for reform. “It would be absurd to talk about changing the registration procedure only for citizens of Ukraine,” the interlocutor noted. Tatiana GRITSENKO |
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