Russia moves to allow registration of cars stolen in Western countries

A Russia State Duma committee has backed a bill that would let Russia register cars stolen in countries it deems “unfriendly”, according to business daily Kommersant.

The Duma’s transport committee recommended that the bill be adopted in the first reading. The legislation would allow the Interior Ministry to create a special registration procedure for vehicles flagged as stolen at the request of states Russian authorities consider “unfriendly”.

Under current rules, an imported car cannot be registered in Russia if it has been flagged internationally as stolen. According to the Interior Ministry, Russian authorities have found roughly 1,500 such vehicles in the country since 2022. The ministry claims that foreign governments rarely respond to Russian inquiries about why a car has been flagged. The bill was drafted on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

“We are now seeing both double standards and numerous cases of abuse of the rights and powers of international law enforcement systems, including when it comes to searches for vehicles,” Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov said.

The draft was first presented in February and submitted to the State Duma in July. The Interior Ministry has justified the changes by saying that Western countries stopped responding to requests from Russian officials after the start of the war in Ukraine. As a result, it says, police cannot determine whether a given car was actually stolen.

The Russian newspaper Izvestia has reported that a scheme for laundering cars stolen in Europe is already operating in the country. The vehicles are brought in through Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, where the rules for registering cars are looser. After being registered to a front person, the car is driven to a city such as Rostov-on-Don and re-registered to its actual new owner, giving it a “clean” history in Russian databases.