Russia's Interior Ministry plans to require migrants entering the country to buy phones equipped with a special surveillance application, Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov told a Federation Council committee on international affairs, according to RBK.
Zubov said that each migrant arriving "especially for work or for a long period" would be required to purchase a phone during registration. "This phone will contain their electronic profile. And we will know the location of each migrant," Zubov was quoted as saying by RBK. "They will not be able to move from one locality to another uncontrollably, or change their place of stay."
The same phone, the deputy minister explained, would receive government notifications — for example, about expiring documents or the need to visit a government office.
Since September 2025, Moscow and the Moscow region have been running an experiment requiring labor migrants from visa-free countries to install the app "Amina," which transmits their location data to the Interior Ministry. According to RBK, citing Interior Ministry data, by mid-December 2025 more than 139,000 people had been removed from migration registration because their geolocation data had been absent from Amina for more than three consecutive working days.