The Russian Foreign Ministry has suspended the issuance of biometric foreign passports for “technical reasons,” the ministry said in an August 26 statement.
The ministry did not give a reason for the decision, but earlier Russia stopped issuing biometric internal documents because of a deficit of the required chips due to sanctions imposed against the country following its unprovoked invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February.
In June, the state-controlled Sberbank savings bank announced it was “recoding” old chips in order to use them for newly issued bank cards.
