Border and migration offences

Article 322 — unlawful border crossing. Crossing without valid documents or without permission. Part 2 covers a person who was already subject to an entry ban, which is the most common form in practice: someone removed after a previous case returns and is prosecuted at the border.

Article 322.1 — organising illegal migration. Organising the unlawful entry, stay or transit of foreign nationals. This is the article aimed at the people who profit, and it has been repeatedly toughened — most recently in 2024, when the sentences in its aggravated parts were raised sharply.

Articles 322.2 and 322.3 — fictitious registration. Registering a person at an address where they do not actually live, or registering foreign nationals at a place of stay without intending to house them there. Both carry up to three years, and both are charged in volume.

The recurring pattern: a person comes to work, pays an intermediary for documents and registration, and is then charged under Article 322.1 because their name appears on paperwork or because they translated, drove, or housed others who came the same way.

Organising requires organising — a role in arranging the unlawful entry or stay, not merely being part of it. Establishing that the accused was a participant rather than a principal, or a victim of the same intermediary, is the central defence, and it is evidenced the same way in every case: payment records, the correspondence through which the service was found, the price paid against the official fee, and who actually controlled the arrangements.

Where the person was in fact deceived, they are a victim of fraud under Article 159, not a perpetrator under Article 322.1. That is a filing worth making in its own right.

Articles 322.2 and 322.3 both carry a note releasing from criminal liability a person who actively assisted in detecting the offence, where their conduct contains no other offence. It is a real and regularly applied provision, and it is time-critical: assistance offered after the case is built is worth much less than assistance offered at the start.

Article 322 has its own limit worth knowing: it does not apply to a foreign national arriving in Russia to seek political asylum or refugee status, where their entry was in breach of the rules but they presented themselves to the authorities.

Almost every one of these prosecutions comes with proceedings under Article 18.8 or 18.10 of the Code of Administrative Offences — breach of residence or work rules — which end in administrative removal and a re-entry ban of up to ten years.

Two things about it. It moves faster than the criminal case, sometimes concluding in days. And its appeal window is ten days, which is routinely missed because everyone is concentrating on the criminal proceedings. If a removal order has been made, tell us the date it was served before anything else.

The document trail: what was submitted, by whom, and whether the accused knew it was false. The intermediary: who was paid, how much, and whether they can be identified. The registration address: whether anyone actually lived there, which is established by witnesses and by the accused’s own movements. And the accused’s role, which is where the difference between three years and fifteen sits.

These cases are frequently assembled quickly and in batches. Examined individually they lose episodes, and often lose the aggravated classification with them.