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I have a friend who is an Israeli citizen but currently only has a Russian passport. They will be traveling from Israel to Dominican Republic with a layover in either Spain, Germany, or France.

The websites of the countries listed above seem to say you only need an Airport Transit Visa if you are from certain countries (not including Russia), otherwise you are fine to layover with no extra documentation/visa. Is this true? Their layover will be less than 12 hours.

Additionally, will they have to go through some sort of passport control before changing flights? The layover for the flight they want is one hour but I'm thinking this won't be enough.

Edit: Yes the flights will be booked through a single booking.

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    Does this answer your question? Ordinary Traveller: How to use Timatic? Transiting from outside of Schengen to outside of Schengen there will be no passport checks, the transfer is wholly in the "sterile airside" but the airline will refuse your friend boarding if they do not have their documents in order -- and the airline will use Timatic to check.
    – user4188
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 1:15
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    For completeness, is the flight itinerary a single booking (one PNR)?
    – Traveller
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 7:55
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    Does this answer your question? Do I need a visa to transit (or layover) in the Schengen area?
    – mlc
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 14:46
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    @CopyRunStart it might and it might not.
    – phoog
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 15:15
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    @CopyRunStart more likely, since anyway Eurowings is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lufthansa. Some sites can give you itineraries that are truly on totally unrelated carriers. To be sure, if you buy the ticket from the airline you're more likely to be on a single reservation then if you buy from a third-party site.
    – phoog
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 15:44

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If the two flights are booked separately, or if there are two or more connection airports inside Schengen, they will need a (full) visa (and one hour is very unlikely to be enough to make the connection).

Otherwise, with a single hop inside Schengen and the two flights on the same ticket, they will stay airside (in the sterile international transit area) and won’t have to go through passport control.

Some nationalities require an airport transit visa in that situation, but this is not the case unless they transit through France and arrive from an airport in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Turkey or Egypt.

So at this time a Russian national arriving from Israel will not need an ATV. Note that can change over time, sometimes with very little notice.

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  • "they will stay airside (in the sterile international transit area": apparently there are some airports where this isn't possible, but (1) I've never made such a transfer myself and (2) these will be smaller airports that don't typically serve as transfer hubs. I'm only mentioning this so that anyone contemplating such a trip looks at the specific airport. I can imagine that flights from nearby eastern European airports might be more likely to involve a transit in a smaller Schengen airport.
    – phoog
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 15:12
  • @phoog I pondered mentioning this, but as far as I’m aware if the airline sells the flights as a connection, with the rare exception of airport changes (CDG-ORY or LHR-LGW for instance), this always happens at airports which have sterile transit. Airports which don’t have sterile transit (such as LTN but there are many more similar airports) are not used for connections sold by airlines. But I may be wrong.
    – jcaron
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 16:02
  • So it seems they key is to have the flights on the same ticket, or "PNR" as @Traveller put it.
    – Copy Run Start
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 17:09
  • @CopyRunStart that’s definitely a requirement.
    – jcaron
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 19:27

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