The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has drawn the attention of investigative units to a special procedure for investigating so-called non-contact road accidents. This refers to situations where one driver creates a danger, and another, trying to avoid a collision, is forced to violate traffic rules and gets into an accident with serious consequences.
The key point is that the first offender's car may not collide with other road users at all. For example, a driver enters the oncoming lane during an overtake, and the oncoming car sharply changes trajectory and crashes into another vehicle or obstacle.
Now, investigators should not automatically consider the person directly involved in the accident as the culprit. It is necessary to examine the actions of both drivers, including with the involvement of experts, and establish a causal link between the initial violation and the subsequent accident.
Extreme necessity must be checked separately. According to the position of the Constitutional Court, which the Ministry of Internal Affairs instructed its units to follow, a violation of traffic rules does not have the characteristics of criminal unlawfulness if the driver acted to eliminate an immediate danger, could not eliminate it in any other way, and the harm caused was less significant than the harm prevented. Such a norm is enshrined in Article 39 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
However, this does not mean automatic exemption for any driver who violated the rules to avoid a collision. The investigation will have to establish the circumstances of a specific accident and prove the existence of conditions of extreme necessity. It is this approach that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has instructed to take into account in its work starting from August 2026.
The practical significance of the clarification lies in changing the very question during the investigation. Now it is necessary to establish not only who violated traffic rules immediately before the accident, but also who created the dangerous situation and whether the subsequent maneuver could have been a forced way to prevent it.