Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The paperwork problem has sat on Russia’s Interior Ministry desk for years, and lawmakers are now preparing to make it disappear.
Russian traffic police have long been barred from issuing license plates to imported cars that show up on Interpol’s international wanted list. The Interior Ministry says it has found roughly 1,500 such vehicles inside the country since 2022, and the pile has been growing faster than officials can process it.
Now a draft law would clear that backlog by letting the ministry register those cars anyway, as long as the request to find them came from a country Moscow has designated as “unfriendly.” The State Duma’s transport committee recommended the bill for first reading, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported, citing coverage of the committee session in Kommersant and Izvestia. The draft was first presented in February and submitted to the Duma in July, and was prepared on the orders of Vladimir Putin.
Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov told lawmakers the measure was prompted in part by the war in Ukraine, according to Izvestia. He pointed to what he called “both double standards and numerous cases of abuse” of international policing tools, and said Western governments stopped responding to Russian inquiries about flagged vehicles after the full-scale invasion began.
The Canadian trail
The figure that gives the story its scale sits with Interpol itself. Between February 2024 and July 2026, the organization recorded 4,798 reports of vehicles stolen in Canada that were later found operating inside Russia, United24 Media reported.
The outlet added that thousands of other imported vehicles entering Russia through parallel-import channels, including routes via the United Arab Emirates, have also surfaced in international stolen-vehicle databases.
Occupied territories and the Ukraine link
Zubov also told the committee that officers in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine struggle to register what the ministry calls “former Ukrainian vehicles,” because Kyiv has placed many of them on the Interpol list.
Izvestia, as cited by Novaya Gazeta Europe, has described a laundering channel already running through the occupied areas: a car is first registered to a front person there under looser local rules, then driven to a Russian city such as Rostov-on-Don and re-registered to its actual new owner, giving it a “clean” history in Russian databases.
The draft follows a Russian Supreme Court ruling this month that sided with a St. Petersburg buyer after traffic police refused to register his Canadian-imported car because of its wanted status. If adopted, the bill would turn that one-off court outcome into a standing registration procedure under the Interior Ministry.
There is just one catch: the amnesty ends at the Russian border. Because the vehicles will remain active on Interpol’s global hotlist, anyone attempting to drive their “legalized” ride abroad risks having it seized on the spot.
