After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many employees of Russian departments, state companies and state corporations became effectively restricted to travel abroad.
Some of them were directly asked to deposit their passports, Sistema was told by a source in the leadership of one of the state-owned companies, a regional government official and a manager of a travel company associated with VIP vacations (all of them asked for anonymity, since they are not authorized to communicate with the press).
On the seizure of passports from some civil servants and employees of state-owned companies writes and DGAP Guest Fellow Alexandra Prokopenko in a column for the Carnegie Center: “In 2022, permits [на выезд] they stopped giving first to management, and later to just employees with access to the second level of secrecy.”
According to Sistema’s interlocutors, in some cases it is about giving the document to the FSB for safekeeping, in some cases – to a special department at the place of work.
Those who do not do this are offered to resign, according to a Sistema source familiar with the internal regulations of one of the state-owned companies. Some employees end up quitting themselves, without waiting for an answer to the question about the seriousness of this threat.
In some cases, FSB officers hint that in case of refusal to hand over the passport, they can somehow “cancel” it, so that in any case it will not help when traveling abroad (actual cases of such “cancellation”, however, are unknown).
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There is no single rule or order regarding foreign passports, according to interlocutors interviewed by Sistema in government agencies at various levels: in some cases, the matter is limited to a strict recommendation to avoid foreign holidays. Someone is banned from any travel abroad, someone outside the EAEU zone (the Eurasian Economic Zone, which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia) or the CSTO (countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization).
A former employee of one of the state-owned banks also heard about a direct ban on traveling abroad for some employees – however, the ban is not total, for many it is a matter of additional approvals within the company. Another federal official says that the ban “at the level of common knowledge” applies to everyone who has at least some level of access to state secrets (there are three in total): they do not ask you to hand over passports directly, but everyone knows that applications for holiday abroad management will not sign.
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A Sistema source close to the administration of the Russian president says that most of the Kremlin’s employees “are not even trying” to leave. Another source, however, claims that during 2022 some of them quite calmly traveled to “neutral” (from the point of view of the Russian political leadership) countries – permission for such a trip could be personally signed by the head of the Kremlin administration Anton Vaino.
The ministries also have an individual approach: some employees are allowed to leave “for good reasons”, someone is released, for example, to the United Arab Emirates with the obligation to fill out a trip report upon their return. There is also such a scheme: before going on vacation, a civil servant signs a notice that he does not intend to visit foreign countries, but leaves anyway, and then reports on the changed plans.
Post-Crimean Syndrome
There were restrictions on personal travel abroad for Russian civil servants and employees of state-owned companies even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the seizure of passports from a wide range of civil servants was not previously publicly reported.
The tightening of rules for Russian officials to visit abroad became known back in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, participated in the armed conflict in the Donbass and the sanctions that followed. Then they announced restrictions on travel abroad for employees of law enforcement agencies and judges. First of all, it was about “unfriendly countries”, the list of which was constantly corrected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. RBC then wrote that in the police, the FSB, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the prosecutor’s office, officers at the level of platoon commander and above were ordered to hand over their passports for safekeeping. The travel ban was formally explained by the form of access to state secrets.
Civil servants and employees of state-owned companies were not subject to such strict prohibitions. Federal civil servants had to obtain permission to leave the country, but often this was done simply on a notification basis, a former federal official told Sistema.
In the government after 2014, for example, there was such a procedure for coordinating foreign trips, says a former employee of the White House: before the trip, it was necessary to sign a corresponding statement from the responsible leader. As a rule, there were no problems with this – however, a few years ago, the government banned travel to the United States and Georgia altogether. Sometimes exit approvals were literally at the level of “go wherever you want, only without photos in social networks,” says another former federal civil servant.
It was the photos in social networks that became the reason for a new wave of public discussion of the need for restrictions for Russian officials and deputies to leave the country. In January 2023, a scandal arose in Russia after the publication of photos of the rest of the deputy of the Kursk Regional Duma Maxim Vasilyeva in Mexico and a Vologda deputy Denis Dolzhenko from Dubai.
At the beginning of 2023, Denis Dolzhenko, a deputy from the Vologda Oblast, posted his photo from a run in Dubai on the Internet
After that, the authorities of several regions of Russia at once stated that officials and deputies should refrain from traveling abroad. However, in most cases, the official appeals were “recommendatory in nature,” wrote the Kommersant newspaper.
Russian government spokesman Boris Belyakov did not answer Sistema’s questions about the new restrictions on civil servants. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, assured in January that “there are no decisions, no directives on this matter at the present time” and that the issue of such a ban is not being discussed.
well forgotten new
Speaking about the absence of new directives, Peskov, apparently, was not deceitful. The fact is that the current Russian laws and regulations already allow restricting the exit of officials and even seizing their passports – primarily from state secret carriers (in theory, every official or employee of a state-owned company can fall under such restrictions, but the exact number of Russians with access to state secret unknown).
Law on the procedure for leaving Russia describes the circle of persons to whom travel may be restricted due to work: those who are admitted to state secrets and have signed an appropriate contract (the ban can be extended even after dismissal), military personnel and those undergoing alternative service, as well as current and former FSB officers for five years after being fired. By law, they must all hand over their passports before the expiration of the restrictions “to the state body that issued the passport.” Some government agencies adopted separate resolutions: according to them, for example, a passport should be handed over to a “secret security unit.”
And under the new law, adopted in July 2022, those who, in theory, are subject to legislative restrictions on exit, but left Russia anyway, can be fined from 200 to 500 thousand rubles or even imprisoned for a period of one to three years. This article is not applied en masse, it is only known that in January 2023 two former officials fined for 250 thousand rubles each – for visiting Abkhazia.