Cars of Russian citizens entering Germany will be arrested, the German customs said – the response of the department is at the disposal of RBC. This is due to sanctions and a ban on the import of transport from the Russian Federation into the country. The personal transport of those who try to enter Germany on it falls into this category, the response says. The import of passenger cars from Russia to the European Union is prohibited, and any movement of goods falls under the concept of "import". Including travel by private transport.
“The import of passenger cars from Russia to the EU is prohibited in accordance with Art. 3i of Regulation 833/2014 defining the embargo against Russia. In this context, the term "importation" actually covers any movement of goods. The embargo does not provide for exceptions to the ban for the circumstances you specified,” follows from the response of a representative of the Central Information Office of the Main Directorate of Customs of Germany to RBC’s request for the possibility of entering Germany by car with Russian numbers.
There have already been such arrests, RBC notes. For example, Russian Ivan Koval, who lives in Germany, faced this. On June 1, a car was taken from him near his house in Hamburg – a customs officer checked the documents, admitted that they were in order, but arrested the car anyway, saying that “from October 2022, the entry of cars with Russian numbers into the EU is prohibited.” Koval noted that shortly before that, he was quietly let through the EU border in Latvia and then not stopped in Lithuania and Poland. The customs officer said that each EU country monitors the implementation of sanctions and makes decisions independently. They did not give him any documents about the arrest, only allowing him to photograph the protocol.
Koval noted that in the English version of the EU regulation 833/2014 on sanctions against Russia due to the destabilization of the situation in Ukraine, the words import and export are used, in German there are similar words (importieren, exportieren), but the more official version is einführen and ausführen. They mean not only "import" and "export", but also "import" and "export". It is because of this that the German customs interprets the regulation as an indication to the arrest of the personal transport of Russians.
