As of Tuesday, September 12, persons with vehicles registered in the Russian Federation are prohibited from entering the European Union (EU) through the Latvian-Russian and Latvian-Belarusian border crossing points.
The CSDD said the law already requires cars with Russian registration to be re-registered. The vehicle owner must have obtained a residence permit and apply to the Directorate. The Directorate has no data on how many cars continue to participate in traffic without re-registration.
The situation should be controlled by the State Police, asking the State Border Guard for information when the car has entered Latvia. Often these cars break road rules, as seen on speed cameras. However, if the owner or user of the vehicle cannot be identified, there is no penalty to be addressed to.
A spokesman for the Road Traffic Safety Directorate Mārtiņš Mālmeisters said that "within three months, this number of cars has to decline. After these three months, essentially all vehicles that have not been re-registered in Latvia are illegal and could not participate in road traffic."
For now, there was no indication that interest in re-registration would have increased.
In August, two vehicles previously registered in Russia were re-registered with the Road Traffic Safety Directorate, both of which were historic vehicles.
