Driving abroad: in which countries you can drive with Russian rights

Traveling by car is a tempting and comfortable event. Firstly, there is no connection to public transport, and secondly, you can plan your own route and stops along the way. It is easy to rent a car even abroad. But here the question becomes relevant, in which countries do Russian driver's licenses work? This topic requires a separate scrupulous consideration.

To date, there are only two types of driver's documents:

• national - allow you to drive a vehicle on the territory of your state;
• international - issued for use on the territory of foreign powers.

It is possible to answer the question of which Russian driver's licenses are valid abroad only in the context of the official documents that regulate this. In particular, we are talking about the Geneva and Vienna conventions.

So, all countries on our planet today can be divided into three groups:

• those who have signed the Vienna Convention;
• those who signed the Geneva Treaty;
• those who did not support any of them.

Accordingly, based on which of the documents the country of visit has joined, it will depend on which driver's license is valid abroad.

States that have not signed any of the conventions recognize only their certificates. This means that it will be possible to drive a car in their open spaces only after the driver passes the relevant exams and receives a local document. There are, of course, exceptions when you can use your national document with a translation attached to it. But before going to such a state, it is better to find out everything in detail.

The signatories of the Geneva Convention of 1949 agreed that in their territories they recognize certificates of international standard. In this case, you can safely take a driver's license to travel abroad and not be afraid that you will not be understood or fined.

The most pleasant category of countries for Russian drivers is the one that includes the participants in the Vienna Convention. This is due to the fact that they recognize any certificates of national and international standard within their borders. The main thing is that they meet the established standards. At the same time, an international document must certainly be supported by a national one, on the basis of which it, in fact, was issued.

It should be noted that in 2006 the format of the driver's license, which is recognized in other countries, was changed. A mandatory requirement is now the numbering of all lines in the document. After the changes were made, the countries participating in the Vienna Treaty were given 5 years (until 2011) to bring all driver's documents in line.

It would be useful to know that the Russian state did not remain aloof from this requirement. The form of a driver's license has acquired a new form. To date, documents issued before 2011 remain valid in other countries, if their validity period has not yet expired.

Most often, drivers ask the question, are Russian driver's licenses valid in Europe? The answer is definitely yes. But in 2014, the European community expressed some distrust of the rights claimed by Russians on European roads. According to human rights activists, the Europeans do not like the absence of an inscription in English under the Russian name of the document. If earlier in the form under the phrase "Driver's license" the French analogue of this phrase was placed, today there is no translation at all.

In this regard, the European police demand that the Russian document be accompanied by an international driving license. How legitimate such a requirement is, opinions differed. On the one hand, the absence of an inscription contradicts the document adopted in Europe, and on the other hand, the Vienna Convention assumes that national rights are also subject to recognition.

From all of the above, in the context of the question, what kind of driver's license is needed in Europe for Russians, we can draw the following conclusions:

Paragraph 1 of article 41 of the Vienna Convention of 1968 states that all parties that have signed the agreement can freely accept foreign-style driver's licenses as a legally binding document. Thus, answering the question in which countries the Russian driver's license is valid, we can say with confidence that in those that have joined this convention.

The only condition is that they must be issued in the territory of the state of their citizenship and remain valid at the time of departure abroad. To better understand the situation, here is a table of signatories of the two conventions mentioned above:

What are international rights

An International Driving Permit is a standard supplement to national driving licenses that is valid in most countries of the world and must be presented in states that have signed the Geneva Convention.

This document is issued solely on the basis of existing rights to drive a vehicle. To do this, you just need to submit an application and the necessary package of papers to the traffic police. There are no additional exams to take. But you still have to provide a certificate confirming the completion of training at a driver's school.

What you need to remember: Russian rights have a validity period of 10 years, but international ones can remain valid for only 3 years, after which they must be replaced. Moreover, if the main - Russian - document is lost or loses its legitimacy, the rights to drive the vehicle abroad will also become invalid.

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