Student visa issues for Russia

[Renee Stillings | Alinga]

Dear colleagues,

Many of you may be sending students abroad to Russia this coming year and we
would advise contacting your Russian partner universities immediately
regarding the new visa regulations.

As you may or may not know, the function of issuing visa support has been
transferred from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Internal
Affairs or the dreaded "OVIR" ...

The result has been confusion and frustration on the part of Russian
universities, particularly those in Moscow. St. Petersburg and other cities
so far do not seem to be encountering the same problems, probably due to
lower drain on the resources there. Moscow on the other hand, is a problem
right now for any student planning to study during the spring semester.

Moscow State University has been told firmly by OVIR that processing of the
visa support is 65 working days. Now, if we count the number of holidays
ahead of us, any student hoping to catch the beginning of the semester in
Russia should have submitted visa documents last month, even though at that
time MGU was not even accepting documents due to the chaos.

We are all hopeful that the Moscow universities will eventually make some
sort of special arrangements in order to speed this process up as clearly it
must be corrected. Business visas have not changed in terms of the time
necessary to issue support and so either this is a clear signal regarding
student visas (i.e. low priority) or the Russian universities have not
recognized that they need to negotiate a better arrangement or lose paying
students.

In short, if you have any students going to Moscow for studies this next
semester, they should be in contact with the Russian host university
immediately regarding the realities of obtaining a visa in time. I imagine
that some programs may opt for arranging business visas where possible.

Should anything change in this situation, I will post an update to the list.
We are also posting any developments on the news section of our site
(www.sras.org).

Regards,
Renee Stillings
The School of Russian and Asian Studies
renee at sras.org
www.sras.org

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