At the border you should produce your valid passport with an open Russian visa, and the filled in migration card. A Migration card is an instrument for performing control over entry, stay and exit of foreign citizens. It consists of two parts. You submit the first one to the border service employee when arriving in Russia, and the second part at the time you leave. There you give your personal information, as well as to whom and for how long you are going to stay as well as your temporary address in Russia. Subsequently this data will be entered into the unified databank. The border service employee will verify the validity of your documents and establish your identity. Besides the frontier control there is also a migration control. The migration service performs discretionary verification of the arriving foreigners. Its main objective is to counteract illegal immigration. But if you know to whom and for what you are arriving and where you will be staying you have nothing to worry about.

    The customs legislation contains a rule indicating that all goods and vehicles passing through the customs border, are subject to customs processing and control. Thus all the goods imported onto the RF territory or exported there are subject to checks before the customs bodies. Though there are some exceptions to that rule. For example, in accordance with the legislation on currency regulation and currency control if foreign currency in cash in the equivalent not exceeding USD3000 is exported from the RF territory such amount is not subject to checks by the customs bodies.

    You may come to Russia by car. In such case a simplified and privileged order of passing the vehicles through the customs border of the Russian Federation will be applied. Here we would like to mention the case when vehicles are passed through the customs border in accordance with the customs regimes of temporary import and export. You will be totally exempt from paying customs taxes and duties when entering or exiting the territory of the Russian Federation, provided that the vehicle is registered in your name, regardless of whether it is your private property or it is rented and (or) registered in the territory of your state, and is for your exclusive personal use for the period of your interim sojourn in the customs territory of the Russian Federation, but for not more than one year inclusive, provided also that within such a period you will neither use it for production or other business activity, nor will alienate, transfer for use, possession or disposal of other persons. At the same time, before entering Russia, irrespective of the way of your movement, terms and purposes of your stay, you need to obtain a visa.