Renewing Russian Passport in the US?

[PG0305 4]

My wife is Russian and a conditional green card holder. We realized yesterday that her passport expires in less than a year. I'd really like to get ahead of this and avoid any issues.

Has anyone had any experiences with renewing a Russian passport in the US recently? I know many consulates are still open and I've seen some spammy looking services from Google Searches that claim to provide passport renewals.

I'm not sure what the process would be and would very much like to avoid her having to fly back to Russia and then re-enter the US. This would not be the worst thing ever but is best to be avoided. 

[Dashinka 25,854]

This thread may be helpful.  When my wife was in that situation, she was regularly traveling to Russia (prior to COVID and Ukraine), so she did it during one of her trips.  Hopefully, your wife has her internal passport/ID, but she will most likely need to visit a consulate in person.

 

Good Luck!

 

 

[mam521 2,508]

How much more time does she need before she can petition for citizenship, if that's something she's considered? 

[Ana.M 13]

Your wife can do that thru the Russian embassy, currently it’s the one in Washington DC. Go to their official website and follow the instructions. She will have to go there in person to apply for passport, she can schedule appointment online. It’s all in Russian so she won’t have any problems to do that. My passport expires soon too and I’m going to do that as well.

good luck 

[Dashinka 25,854]

1 hour ago, mam521 said:

How much more time does she need before she can petition for citizenship, if that's something she's considered? 

Doesn’t really matter unless there are no plans to ever go back to Russia.  If one desires to visit Russia anytime in the future, they will want to maintain their Russian international passport to avoid the need for a visa.

Edited June 30 by Dashinka

[Neonred 3,915]

On 6/30/2025 at 12:17 PM, Dashinka said:

Doesn’t really matter unless there are no plans to ever go back to Russia.  If one desires to visit Russia anytime in the future, they will want to maintain their Russian international passport to avoid the need for a visa.

I'm curious about this as my wife has been unsuccessful at renewing her Russian passport (more on this below) and it seems that a Russian citizen must enter Russia on their Russian passport and a visa is not supposed to be issued to them on another countries passport.  

 

My wife's internal and international passports expired just before we had planned to go to Russia to renew them.  This was several years ago.  Some confusion on US vs European date formats...

 

Wife's passport had been renewed once at the embassy in DC, done by mail back when they were issuing just 5 year passports.  Five years later when both had expired was when we ran into trouble.  An expired internal passport is a big problem.  The embassy said they could not determine that she was a Russian citizen!  They needed  more documents and additional money to work on this.  After sending everything and waiting several months the story was the same.  We gave up.  Fortunately my wife already had her US passport.  Wife never really cared that much about following up on the Russian passport.

 

Wife's US passport lists her place of birth as Kyrgyzstan as she was born in that Soviet Republic.  I told her we might try to get a visa to Russia thinking it might slide through unnoticed.  So far we have not had any reason to return to Russia.