Annotation

The purpose of the study is to determine the limits of parents’ private autonomy in determining a child’s place of residence and agreeing on the exercise of parental rights when parents live separately. Based on an analysis of current Russian family legislation, case law of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and legal scholarship published in 2024–2026, the article distinguishes the legal regimes of agreements under Article 65(3) and Article 66(2) of the Family Code of the Russian Federation and substantiates a three-level analytical model of “controlled dispositivity”: the primacy of parental agreement, substantive limits on autonomy and subsidiary public control. The author proposes introducing a simple written form for an agreement determining a child’s place of residence, an optional mechanism for judicial approval of an agreement under Article 66 of the Family Code, and a differentiated approach to ascertaining the child’s views, including the use of specialized psychological knowledge where justified.