Russia will start issuing plastic IDs in 2016, phase out passports in 2017-2018

Kremlin and St. Basil's

MOSCOW. Dec 9 (Interfax) – Russia will stop issuing domestic passports in 2017-2018 and replace them with plastic cards, head of the Federal Migration Service (FMS) Konstantin Romodanovsky has said.

“We will launch the cards in 2016,” he said during a lecture at Moscow State University on Friday.

“We would want to launch wide-scale use of the document as of 2016,” he said.

He said that for about a year plastic cards will be issued along with domestic passports but in 2017-2018 the issue of domestic passports will be stopped.

On November 20 Romodanovsky told Interfax that in 2015 Russia would start massively issuing foreign passports with fingerprints.

On July 1 Russia launched a pilot project of issuing foreign biometric passport with fingerprints in Moscow area and St. Petersburg.

Presently Russia has two types of foreign passports: the old one issued for a term of five years and the new biometric one issued for 10 years.

FMS announced that the issue of passports with fingerprints complies with the requirements of the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Organization for Standardization.

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