Digital military registration and enlistment offices will be fully operational no earlier than 2025

The unified digital register of military records, which is being created by the Ministry of Digital Development, will be fully operational no earlier than 2025, the department said. Previously, the Russian government planned to put the register into operation in 2024. The Ministry of Digital Development explains the protracted preparation by “strict requirements” for information security and the infrastructure being created, including communication channels. A Kommersant source familiar with the development of the project mentions among the problems interaction with universities, which are reluctant and inconsistent in providing data on students, as well as the lengthy state certification of the register and its components.

Deputy Head of the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation Oleg Kachanov announced the planned timing of commissioning of the digital register of military records at the conference “Digitalization in the Public Sector”. According to him, the pilot project of the register will be launched this year in one or two regions (the department does not say which entities are being discussed) “with a limited amount of functionality and a limited amount of information.” Full commissioning of the system “is impossible before 2025.” The official explained this by “very stringent requirements in terms of infrastructure and information security,” adding that the information in the register does not contain military, but official secrets. Mr. Kachanov mentioned that the need to create secure communication channels requires “time and material costs” (without specification).

In May 2023, the Russian government published a draft resolution on the introduction of a unified digital register of military records in Russia. The Ministry of Digital Development was entrusted with creating it; the Ministry of Defense will act as the operator of the system. It was proposed to enter 25 fields into the registry database containing information about the citizen, including passport data, tax identification number, telephone number, information about studies and work, criminal record and health status (see “Kommersant” dated May 10, 2023). The document talked about the government’s plans to fully commission the system in 2024, while its testing was supposed to take place in 2023. However, this draft government resolution was never approved. In July 2023, the White House issued Resolution No. 1200, amending the draft regulations, approving a new form of summons from the military registration and enlistment office and the possibility of duplicating such paper documents with electronic ones (with mailing to your personal account on the government services portal). Let us recall that in April 2023, the State Duma adopted a law according to which citizens can be summoned to the military registration and enlistment office through the government services portal, prohibiting them from leaving the country before appearing at the military registration and enlistment office, and prohibiting draft dodgers from driving a car, concluding real estate transactions, receiving bank loans and registering individual entrepreneurs.

According to Kommersant’s interlocutor, who is familiar with the progress of work on the project to develop a military registration register, its implementation is difficult not only because of a lack of infrastructure or difficulties in meeting information security requirements. According to him, there are several other key problems that officials face when organizing the registry. “The first is that today the only source of machine-readable data on conscripts, on the basis of which it is possible to create a register of those who have or do not have a deferment, is not military registration and enlistment offices (where the data is still in analog form), but universities. But universities are reluctant to upload data – there is no document yet that obliges educational institutions to upload data about their students to the registry,” explains the interlocutor. He adds that the second problem of interaction with educational institutions is related to the fact that even the data that can be obtained varies from university to university in its format and set of lines: “At the beginning of the summer there was a meeting on this issue with representatives of Rosobrnadzor. They just discussed the problem that there are still no regulations that would clearly define the format of the uploaded data and their set.”

Rosobrnadzor did not respond to Kommersant’s request on September 19.

The problems of forming the register, Kommersant’s interlocutor insists, do not end there: “Another difficulty is related to the fact that the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEK; an executive body that is responsible for countering foreign technical intelligence in the country, security critical information infrastructure, protection of state secrets.— “Kommersant”) has not yet certified the registry and elements of its architecture. I think we will only wait for official certification in the spring.”

On September 19, FSTEC also did not respond to Kommersant’s request about possible problems with the registry certification.

The Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation, when asked whether the developers of the registry have problems with universities and certification, as well as the amount of financial costs that Mr. Kachanov mentioned, also did not provide information.

Alexander Voronov, Nikita Korolev