A foreign passport, which certifies the identity of a citizen of the Russian Federation when leaving its borders, has a limited validity period, so it must be changed periodically.
The validity period of a foreign passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation depends on the type of this document.
Validity and exchange of passport
Currently, the bodies of the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation are issuing foreign passports of two main types. The first of them is an ordinary passport, which is often called an old-style document. It contains only paper pages and is valid for 5 years from the date of issue. Thus, after this period, the passport becomes invalid and must be replaced.
The second type of documents that are issued to citizens today is a foreign passport with an electronic carrier of information, which is also called a new passport. It contains a special plastic module, which contains in encrypted form all the basic information about the owner of the document. The validity of such a passport is 10 years, after which it must also be exchanged.
At the same time, in practice, the need to replace a passport may occur even before the actual expiration of its validity period. Firstly, it may arise due to the fact that a frequently traveling citizen has run out of free space in his passport, intended for setting border crossing marks. Secondly, some countries require that the passport remained valid for some time after the end of the trip, and this period may well reach 6 months or more. Therefore, in this case, the passport must be changed, even if formally it is valid, for example, for another two months.
Passport exchange procedure
In all these cases, you must contact the nearest body of the Federal Migration Service, providing the documents necessary to obtain a new passport. Their list includes an application for the issuance of a new document, a receipt for payment of the state duty for the service of issuing a passport, photographs of the established sample and a general civil passport. For some categories of citizens, additional documents may be required: for example, unemployed citizens will need to present a work book or an extract from it.
A specialist of the Federal Migration Service will accept the submitted documents, check their completeness and compliance with the established requirements, and then register your application for a passport. At the same time, please note that if at the time of filing an application for the issuance of a new document, the validity of the old passport has not yet expired, it will also need to be handed over to the FMS. After that, within one month, you will be issued a new passport. If you submit documents to the FMS branch that does not correspond to the place of your registration, the waiting period for a new passport will be 4 months.
