English-medium MBBS in Russia: what NMC requires and what Russian rules say

Each fact below links to the document it comes from: the FMGL-2021 Gazette text and NMC’s notices, the bulletin of the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS), which runs the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE), Russian federal law and ministry orders, and the universities’ own regulations and admission pages. Where no document answers a question, the page says so.

What the NMC rule says

Regulation 4 of FMGL-2021 opens: “No foreign medical graduate shall be granted permanent registration, unless he has–”. A list follows, and language is one line of it:

• ›(a)(i) a course leading to the foreign medical degree of at least 54 months;
• ›(a)(ii) an internship of at least 12 months in the same foreign medical institution;
• ›(a)(iii) “Received a foreign medical degree with medium of instructions in English”;
• ›(a)(iv) the mandatory subjects in Schedule I;
• ›(b) registration with the body competent to license doctors in the country that awarded the degree, at par with that country's citizens;
• ›(c) a supervised internship of at least 12 months in India;
• ›(d) the National Exit Test (NExT) “or such other mandated test or tests conducted by the Commission”.

The English condition is its own sub-clause, separate from course length, internship and subjects, and it is written about the degree the graduate receives. It is also left undefined. Regulation 2 defines seven terms, from “Act” to “Supervised Internship”, and “medium of instructions” is not among them. The Gazette text does not mention bilingual courses, a local language, or the language of clinical training, of patients or of examinations.

The rule binds students admitted on or after 18 November 2021, the day FMGL-2021 came into force. Under its regulation 5, anyone who already held a foreign medical degree, or was already studying abroad, before that date stays under “the erstwhile applicable regulations”.

NMC’s own explanation

NMC’s FAQs on the FMGL Regulations, dated 22 February 2022 in NMC’s list of rules and regulations, ask it as question 6: “What should be the medium of instruction during the course?” The answer is one word, “English”, with a reference to regulation 4(a)(iii). The FAQ ties English to the course, the Gazette ties it to the degree, and neither says more. The FAQs also carry a disclaimer: they are an explanation for the public that “cannot be upheld in a court of law”, and readers are sent to the Gazette notifications for legal validity.

What NMC’s notices add

Since 2023, NMC’s Undergraduate Medical Education Board (UGMEB) has repeated the medium condition in its warnings to students going abroad. None of the warnings defines it further.

Checked 18 October 2026. The July 2025 note shows only the month on its face; NMC’s alert of 1 April 2026 refers to it as the alert note dated 21 July 2025.

The Uzbekistan alert is the only NMC text we found that ties the language of teaching to hands-on clinical training. No NMC document we searched uses the word “bilingual” or the phrases “local language” or “Russian language”, or decides whether a course taught partly in another language passes. We searched the FMGL-2021 Gazette text, the FMGL FAQs, NMC’s FAQ of 8 June 2026, and the notices of 8 August 2023, 7 December 2023, 19 May 2025, 21 July 2025, 18 March 2026 and 1 April 2026. If anyone tells you NMC rejects bilingual programmes, or accepts them, ask which document says so.

Who checks it, and when

NMC’s alert note of 21 July 2025 says “FMGL Regulations are applied at the time of screening/registration”. Both of those come after you graduate, years after the course was chosen.

At the screening test

Clause 4.14 of NBEMS’s October 2026 information bulletin says the eligibility of candidates admitted on or after 18-11-2021 “shall be determined strictly in accordance with” FMGL-2021, and that a candidate “found to be non-compliant with any provision thereof shall be declared INELIGIBLE for appearing in FMGE”. The English condition is one of those provisions.

The bulletin does not say how the medium is checked. Its 129 pages never use the word “medium”. The documents it says NBEMS “may also” ask for when there is doubt about eligibility (para 8.34) include a copy of the internship certificate if the internship was done abroad, but no medium-of-instruction certificate. The exam itself is in English: each of its 300 questions has four options “in English language only” (para 5.1). The rest of the exam is on our FMGE guide.

At registration

NMC’s public notice of 18 March 2026 says the responsibility to process a foreign medical graduate’s application for permanent registration rests “exclusively with the respective State Medical Councils (SMCs)”, in consultation with the state Directorate of Medical Education. Clause 10.11 of the NBEMS bulletin says the medical council decides eligibility for registration after checking documents that include the degree certificate, attested by the Indian Embassy or apostilled. In the context of make-up training for online study, NMC’s FAQ of 8 June 2026 (Q5 and Q6) says the council examines the transcripts issued by the parent foreign institution or, where there are none, its other documents such as mark sheets and internship completion certificates. None of these documents says how a council checks the medium of instruction.

What Russian law says

Russian federal law starts from Russian. Article 14, part 2, of Federal Law No. 273-FZ “On Education in the Russian Federation” says educational activity is carried out in the state language of the Russian Federation, “если настоящей статьей не установлено иное”, unless the article provides otherwise. Part 5 allows education in a foreign language in accordance with the educational programme and the organisation’s local normative acts, and part 6 leaves the language or languages of education to those acts. Each university writes its own rules, which is why the next section reads them one at a time.

For the diploma, article 60, part 2, says documents on education and qualification are issued in Russian and may also be issued in a foreign language under the procedure the organisation sets. An English copy is the university’s choice.

The State Final Attestation (Государственная итоговая аттестация, or GIA) is the set of final exams at the end of the course. Its federal procedure, Order No. 636 of 29 June 2015 of the Ministry of Education and Science, says nothing about language: the word “язык” does not appear in its 58 paragraphs. The language of the GIA is left to each university.

The right to practise in Russia

Article 69, part 1 of Federal Law No. 323-FZ on health protection gives the right to practise medicine in Russia to people educated in Russian institutions who have passed specialist accreditation. The Health Ministry’s Order No. 709n of 28 October 2022, in force from 1 January 2023 to 1 January 2029, says in paragraph 69 that primary accreditation “проводятся на русском языке”: it is held in Russian. Its stages are a test, practical skills in simulated conditions, and clinical case problems for General Medicine graduates. We read paragraph 69 in the copy Roszdravnadzor posted in March 2023 and have not seen an official consolidated text, so we cannot rule out a later amendment.

This matters for India because FMGL-2021 regulation 4(b) asks for registration with the body “competent to grant license to practice medicine” in the country that awarded the degree, “at par with the license to practice medicine given to citizen of that country”. For a graduate of a Russian university, the Russian right to practise comes through accreditation, and accreditation is in Russian. That is our reading of the Russian rules side by side. No NMC document we read says which Russian document satisfies regulation 4(b), or whether a State Medical Council will ask for the accreditation certificate. Working in Russia is covered on career after MBBS in Russia.

Russian laws read on ConsultantPlus, a commercial legal database, as amended to 4 August 2026 (273-FZ and 323-FZ) and 4 February 2025 (Order No. 636); the official publication is on pravo.gov.ru. Checked 18 October 2026.

What eight universities’ own documents say

We read each university’s language regulation, its published list of programme languages or its admissions page, on the university’s own site. Agents’ summaries were not used.

Read on each university’s own site on 18 October 2026. The websites of Perm State Medical University and Kazan Federal University did not open for us that day, so they are not in the table.

The words differ. Volgograd and Pirogov call the English track an “intermediary language” programme (язык-посредник); Kazan and Pirogov say “Russian or English”; Sechenov and Bashkir list Russian and English side by side. An intermediary language is a foreign language used to teach part of a programme (Volgograd’s clause 3.1). At Volgograd it is English: the entrance language test is in Russian or English depending on the track, and the dean’s office names English as the alternative to Russian. Orenburg’s rules let its academic council run a programme partly or fully in a foreign language. None of these documents gives a year-by-year split of which subjects are taught in which language. Kazan and Bashkir say the split is written in each programme’s general description and curriculum, which we did not obtain.

Where Russian stays on an English track

Russian lessons

Volgograd (clause 2.7), Bashkir (clause 2.9) and Orenburg (clause 7.8) allow foreign students to be taught Russian as a foreign language within the “Foreign language” discipline. Kazan’s regulation places “Русский язык как иностранный” (Russian as a foreign language) inside the main programme. None of the four says in which years it is taught, or for how many hours.

The State Final Attestation

Volgograd’s regulation is the plainest document we found. Its clause 3.10 says that when part of a programme is delivered in the intermediary language, the teaching, practices, classwork, self-study, continuous assessment and semester exams of that part are in that language, but “итоговая (государственная итоговая) аттестация осуществляется на русском языке”: the State Final Attestation is held in Russian. The documents we read from the other seven universities do not say what language their GIA is in, and the federal procedure is silent. Ask.

The diploma and your records

Volgograd (clause 3.11, on both tracks), Kazan (clause 2.11), Bashkir (clause 2.11) and Orenburg (clause 7.10) issue education documents in Russian. Bashkir also keeps personal files and certificates of study in Russian (clause 2.10). Article 60 of 273-FZ lets a university add a foreign-language version under its own procedure, so ask whether yours issues the diploma or a transcript in English as well.

Patients

No university page we read states the language of bedside teaching or of talking to patients. Pavlov First St Petersburg says clinical training “is conducted in clinics, with patients”, with “personal curation of the patient by the student (under observation of the teaching professor)”. Sechenov says its Russian course is there to help students talk to patients in Russian hospitals. The only NMC text that links language to clinical work is the Uzbekistan alert of 1 April 2026.

Switching tracks

Volgograd lets a foreign student move from the Russian track to the intermediary-language track, or back, by applying within a month of the start of a semester and passing an internal language exam (clauses 3.8 and 3.9). The medium of a course can therefore change part-way through. NMC’s notice of 8 August 2023 says any variation in the medium of instructions “may lead to disqualification”, with the responsibility on the candidate.

What nobody has ruled on

We found no document that answers these questions as of 18 October 2026. If someone gives you a firm answer to one, ask them for the document.

• ›Whether NMC treats an intermediary-language track whose State Final Attestation is in Russian as a degree "with medium of instructions in English". No NMC regulation, FAQ or notice addresses it.
• ›Whether a course taught partly in English and partly in Russian meets FMGL-2021.
• ›Whether a State Medical Council or NBEMS wants the Russian accreditation certificate as proof of regulation 4(b), or accepts the diploma alone.
• ›Which years of General Medicine are taught in English, and which in Russian, at any one university.
• ›What NMC's public notice of 22 November 2024 says. NMC's alerts of 2025 and 2026 cite it, but we could not find it on NMC's website.
• ›What the Indian Embassy in Moscow advises on the medium of instruction. We could not read its website when we checked, so look for its guidance yourself before admission.

What to get in writing before you pay

NMC’s page for students going abroad says it “does not endorse any list of Foreign Medical Institutions/ Universities”, and that “details of the course (which should be commensurate with the MBBS courses in India such as content, duration and internship) etc. should be directly obtained from the University/ Institution concerned.” FMGL-2021’s Schedule I adds that “The course curriculum shall be made available for review by appropriate authorities”. That curriculum is where Kazan and Bashkir say the language of each discipline is set, and Volgograd’s regulation says the features of each foreign-language programme, including the intermediary language, are published on its official website (clause 3.2).

Ask the university for these, in writing, and keep the replies:

1. The language of each year of the course, and of each discipline, as written in the curriculum or the programme’s general description (общая характеристика ОП).
2. The language of the State Final Attestation.
3. The language of clinical classes, ward rounds and patient histories.
4. Where and when the 12-month internship takes place, and in what language. FMGL-2021’s Schedule I wants it “in addition to such course”, at the same institution, and NMC’s FAQ (Q17) says it “is done after the completion of MBBS course”.
5. Whether the diploma, or a transcript, is also issued in English. Article 60 of 273-FZ allows it under the university’s own procedure.
6. Whether any practice or rotation takes place outside Russia. Pavlov First St Petersburg’s English page says summer practice is “conducted in clinics of Saint-Petersburg or abroad”, and FMGL-2021 Schedule I says no part of the training or internship may be done in India or in any country other than the one that awards the degree.
7. Whether you can switch to, or be moved to, the Russian-medium track, and on what terms. Volgograd’s regulation lets a student apply to switch no later than a month after a semester starts, and the switch follows an internal language exam (clauses 3.8 and 3.9).
8. If a preparatory Russian-language year comes before the course, how long it lasts. A NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) result is valid for three years from the date the result is declared, “entitling a candidate to pursue MBBS or equivalent medical course including pre-medical/language course, if any”, according to NMC’s study-abroad page. Clause 4.6.3 of the FMGE October 2026 bulletin quotes the same rule from a Gazette notification of 14 March 2019.

The State Medical Council reads the university’s documents when you apply for registration, after the course and FMGE, and the 8 August 2023 notice puts the responsibility for any variation on you. The other FMGL-2021 conditions are in our guide “Is my university NMC approved?”, and university-by-university FMGE results are on FMGE pass rates.