Russia / Mongolia visa issues
 

anyone familiar with the russian visa process? i understand i need a letter of intro from a russian tourist company, and something from a travel agent in my home country, to submit with the application for visa. can someone recommend russian contact? also, is there any dramas with multi entry - i'm planning to enter eastern mongolia from russia, then back into russia from western mongolia.

further, does anyone know how soon before i want to enter russia, i can apply for visa? finally, whats the drum on mongolian visas?
thanks in advance
ciao
d

I guess you're Australian and will be applying in Australia.

If so then you need to organise a letter of invitiation for Russia (largely just another fee and process in the paperwork nowadays). Many agencies will take your details and write you a letter of invitation, you can find some here. From memory I used visatorussia.com but talk to a few and find out yourself who are legit and good.

Then you send your LOI and application to the Russian embassy/consulate. Again from memory you can specify a starting date for your visa up to 3 months in the future, and enter any date after that. Info should be around on the embassy homepages though (incidentally I'd recommend going through the Canberra Embassy, not the Sydney consulate, they are 1000x easier to deal with).

Mongolian visa was a painless affair through the embassy/consulate.

I used visalink-russia.com and got my letter within a couple of days and then of to the Russian Embassy, 3 days later a had my visa

If you're an Aussie, Mongolia now has an Embassy in Canberra (opened about a year ago). See their website here: Embassy of Mongolia in Australia - Home, which has a link on the front page to the visa application forms.

I know Ambassador Jambaldorj, he's a nice guy with very good English. He's very interested in building ties between Australia and Mongolia so I believe they will be very helpful with visas.

Regards, Scott

If you want to get the visa in the quickest manner possible...ask the Russian consulate in UB which agency they recommend to provide the invite.

Use that agency...Stan Tours is a good option, BUT David will be honest with you and tell you if travellers using his service have faced difficulties.

Also search the Thorntree for other travellers who may have had recent success...

The Russian consulate in UB can be difficult.

I have a russian friend who is getting me a personal invitation which i hope to use to obtain a visa in Ulan Batar. Do you know anything about how succussfull this might be?

I get a inviatation from relatives in russia via the MVD , they send that to us and we send that to the embassy on the visa we write where we want to go IE areas of the country, the advatage of this is that you only need to register in the local MVD office where the inviation is issued ONCE and then you can go anywhere in the countrry you like, eg if I put moscow to vladisvostok as travel area it covers all the areas and no problems
hope this helps
Inviatations are much easier in russia than in NZ, NZ demands everything including support money etc, interestingly Russia for all its authoration regime does not care about this, the world id a funny place