Hereby we would like to inform you of the recent change in requirements for documents filed for processing of Employment permits and Work permits for foreign nationals that have been implemented by Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation.

Based on the information provided by the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation and Department of the Federal Migration Service for Moscow, it is a mandatory requirement that all petitions for Employment permit and Work permit must contain an apostilled or legalized copy of all the documents that have been issued outside of Russia.

This requirement is based on the Government Regulation #681, dated November 15, 2006 (article III, #24.) ?On the order of issue of migration related documents required for foreign nationals to carry out labour activity on the territory of the Russian Federation? that says ?Official documents issued outside of the Russian Federation that are presented in order to obtain Work Permit shall be legalized by diplomatic representative establishments, consular offices of the Russian Federation abroad, unless otherwise determined by international treaties with the Russian Federation. Documents that contain foreign language shall be translated into the Russian language and notarized. If copies presented without originals, such copies must be also notarized?.

As you may notice the regulations have been in effect since 2006, although, up until recently both FMS RF (and DFMS Russia for Moscow) have accepted documents containing Diploma copy with notarized translation into Russian only. Therefore the state authorities have not complied with this particular requirement. It is not clear what was the reason for implementation of this requirement at this stage. Probably, frequent cases of documents forgery, since officials of the FMS Russia have no possibility to verify if a foreign national graduated in fact a particular educational institution abroad.

We have tried to resolve this issue and get the permission of the FMS RF to file documents as before, just submitting Diploma copy, but, unfortunately, have been refused. Due to the above-said we kindly ask you to notify foreign employees of Your company on the need to get Apostille / Consular legalization of the Diploma issued outside of Russia.

However it should be noted here that Russia has agreements with a number of countries for mutual recognition of official documents: a document duly processed and issued in the country from the below list shall be accepted by the Russian authorities without any formalities such as Consular legalization or Apostille. Thus the list of countries looks as follows: some CIS states (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belorus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine), Albany, Algeria, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Vietnam, Spain (with respect to documents issued by the registry office), Cyprus, Democratic People?s Republic of Korea, Cuba, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Panama, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Check republic, Estonia, Serbia and Montenegro.

Whereas, Consular legalization as well as Apostille verification is a time consuming procedure, we foresee delays in obtaining work permissive documents.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.