Biometric passports for foreign travel that include a digital record of the holder's fingerprints will be issued on a mass scale beginning in 2015, Federal Migration Service head Konstantin Romodanovsky said Wednesday.
A trial run begun on July 1 in St. Petersburg and the Moscow region has gone well, Romodanovsky told Interfax.
"Overall the system works. For now it is an experiment. The technology is being revised, there are no major malfunctions," he said.
A total of 15,000 biometric passports with fingerprints have been issued so far, which "isn't many," he added. "We wish more people wanted them."
Russia currently issues two kinds of passports for foreign travel — the 10-year biometric passport and the so-called "old five-year" passport, which is less expensive.
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