The Supreme Court reviewed and sent for review the case of a resident of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Sergei Martynov, who has been trying for three years to prove that he was illegally deprived of his rights for refusing to take an alcohol test. The problem arose due to a driver who used a fake – so-called mirror – license with Martynov’s data. He was detained by traffic police inspectors back in 2023. Based on materials from the police, the courts decided to deprive the real Sergei Martynov of his identity card. The real offender went to serve in the Northern Military District and died there – it is no longer possible to bring him to justice.
The circumstances of the incident, the victim of which was the driver from Nizhny Novgorod Sergei Martynov, are set out in the published decision of the Supreme Court (SC) and the materials of the complaint and inspections, which Kommersant has read.
In July 2023, the driver discovered an unpaid fine in the amount of 30 thousand rubles for a violation that he did not commit. He began to look into it and also found out that he had been deprived of his driver’s license for six months – such a punishment will begin in January 2023 appointed Justice of the Peace in Klin, Moscow Region. The resolution stated that on January 8, 2023, inspectors stopped a driver with a license in the name of Sergei Martynov, who was driving a Vortex Tingo crossover. The police asked the driver to check for intoxication, but he refused, for which he was punished.
But the real Sergei Martynov was at home in Nizhny Novgorod at the time of the inspection. Moreover, he never had a Vortex Tingo.
In August 2023, Martynov reported all this to the Klin City Court. Judge left The decision is in force, indicating, among other things, that the case file contains a video recording from the recorder in the traffic police car. Then Sergei Martynov went directly to the court, which deprived him of his rights. There he was given a copy of the videotape in which there was another man. However, his driver’s license number completely coincided with the license number of Sergei Martynov. The protocol also stated that the man was registered in the village of Selkhoztekhnika in the Boksitogorsky district of the Leningrad region, and not in Nizhny Novgorod. Having new evidence in hand, in October 2023, Sergei Martynov appealed to the First Cassation Court of General Jurisdiction. But this too didn’t help: the court found that all these arguments do not prove his innocence and do not call into question previous decisions.
For refusing to undergo an intoxication test for the first time, a driver may be deprived of his license for one and a half to two years, but the punished citizen is obliged to hand over his certificate to the traffic police – otherwise this period will not be counted. Sergei Martynov does not plan to do this, because he does not agree with the deprivation of his rights, so his sentence is paused and he cannot drive from 2023.
In April 2024, Sergei Martynov contacted the Department of Internal Affairs of the Boksitogorsky district, where the real offender allegedly lived. The police checked the address indicated in the protocol, and the woman living there said that her husband, whose name was Denis Danilchenko, was captured on the video. It was he who was driving that same Vortex crossover. But Martynov’s license was not returned, because this must be done by the court. Therefore, in April 2024, he turned to the Supreme Court with a package of evidence.
While his complaint was being considered, Sergei Martynov turned to the Klin police with a demand to initiate a criminal case under Art. 327 of the Criminal Code “Forgery of documents”, but was refused. The Klin prosecutor’s office sided with the driver, pointing out that the police did not complete all “the measures necessary to make a legal and informed decision.” According to Kommersant, correspondence between the Department of Internal Affairs and the supervisory authority is still ongoing. Sergei Martynov also appealed to the Boksitogorsk City Court. He demanded compensation for moral damages in the amount of 100 thousand rubles from Denis Danilchenko. due to the fact that he cannot drive a car for a long time and is forced to prove that he did nothing.
But on December 29, 2025 the court refused satisfy this claim by confirming that Mr. Danilchenko used false licenses. By the time the claim was considered in court, the man had died in the Northern Military District, where he had gone to serve under a contract.
During the investigation, Sergei Martynov accidentally discovered that another driver had used his name – but this time in the Penza region. In October 2023, this person also presented traffic police inspectors with the rights to the name Sergei Martynov. But by that time, the real Martynov had already been deprived of his license, so the second false Martynov was given administrative arrest for driving without a license (Part 2 of Article 12.7 of the Administrative Code). After the court decision, the police took the man to the detention center, where they checked the citizen database and discovered that the motorist is not at all like Sergei Martynov. Then the man admitted that he had bought a fake ID with someone else’s data.
Sergei Martynov sent materials on this episode to the Supreme Court. In June 2026, he came to the conclusion that the lower courts made several errors. In particular, they did not interview the inspectors who drew up the protocol, as well as the witnesses present. The case was sent for review to the Klinsky District Court of the Moscow Region. Sergei Martynov hopes that the decision will be made in his favor and he will be able to legally drive.
Such false licenses are not uncommon today, the founder of the “Overheard in the Traffic Police” project, retired traffic police captain Valentin Ilyinov, told Kommersant. They are called “mirror”: scammers receive information about a random citizen’s identity card from the database, and then print a copy of it with a photo of the person who ordered the fake. “In this case, it is unclear why the inspectors did not conduct a more thorough check,” the expert asks. “Usually this can be done right on the spot by comparing the photo on the driver’s license with an electronic copy of the license from the traffic police database. You can quickly request it and view it directly on your service tablet. It is possible that some technical reason interfered. Or, for example, they called the duty station, dictated the number and found out that the rights were valid, and they limited themselves to that.” The head of the State Duma Committee on Social Policy, Yaroslav Nilov, commenting on the situation, gives an analogy with cases when some drivers put other people’s license plates on their cars, and then the unsuspecting car owner receives fines for violations that he did not commit. Forgery of documents, notes Mr. Nilov, is already punishable by the Criminal Code, but taking into account law enforcement practice, it is worth considering a mechanism with additional verification of the identity of violators so that bona fide car owners do not become victims of such situations.
