This chapter provides an overview of the legal environment in Russia: the developments in immigration and refugee laws since the dissolution of the Soviet Union till the present-day. It identifies specific logics according to which these both branches of law developed in Russia. With regard to the refugee law, this chapter discusses the bifurcated system that existed historically in the 1990s – dividing refugees into forced migrants (hailing from the former post-Soviet space) and developing world refugees. This system was unified in 2000s, when these two policy approaches became aligned toward the restrictive end of the spectrum resulting in extremely low refugee recognition rates in contemporary Russia. The immigration law – one of the most prolific and dynamic pieces of legislation in present-day Russia – also escapes easy categorisations. I heuristically divided these developments into a number of different phases placing each of them on the spectrum between restrictionism (with elements of criminalisation) and liberal (administrative) migration management. The evolution of these different legal developments is accompanied by the institutional history of the Federal Migration Service, the main body responsible for migration and refugee law enforcement in Russia.