2023-07-13 14:12:14
Photo: Kirill Kukhmar / TASS
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Schengen visas are now for courageous tourists. The Spaniards and Italians immediately warn: wait up to a month or longer, so serve early, dear Russians. Temporary registration in Moscow is not an option – where you received a residence permit, go there. And the French, it seems, quietly cut off the number of slots for serving, which they might not catch anyway. “Fontanka” has collected the latest Schengen innovations.
In St. Petersburg, long-term Finnish and Estonian Schengen are forgotten. The main countries that issue not single passes, but full-fledged multi-visas to Russian tourists, can be counted on the fingers of one hand: these are Spain, France and Italy. And in all three there were changes in the summer.
On the site Spanish Visa Application Center Recently, information appeared in Moscow that the period for consideration of visa applications can now be up to 45 days from the date of receipt of the application at the Consulate General of Spain. The Italian Visa Application Center also warned shortly before that the deadlines had been extended to 30 calendar days.
Serving, therefore, must be done in advance. The Spanish visa center now accepts documents no later than six weeks before the trip, although earlier the deadline was 10 working days, Fontanka was told there. If the applicant insists on submitting documents with an earlier departure, then they can be accepted, but not the fact that the visa will be issued on time. In Italy, they warned that it is necessary to apply at least 15 working days before the flight. This information appears when registering on the website of the visa center.
In addition, since July 6, the Italian VMS visa center no longer accepts documents from residents of Moscow with temporary registration. Petersburgers and residents of the Northwestern Federal District are advised to serve at home. What does this mean: only applicants with permanent registration in the capital or the Moscow region, that is, with a stamp in their passport, can apply for a visa in Moscow. Holders of permanent registration in St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Murmansk, Novgorod, Pskov regions and the Republic of Karelia should apply to VMS in St. Petersburg. And all the rest are sent to the Almaviva visa centers in the regions.
The French visa center has at least halved the number of slots for filing documents in recent weeks, they are sure trying to catch them on the Vinsky forum and profile chats on Telegram. According to them, now only 20-30 recording slots are issued per day, although until recently there were more.
However, this is subjective – in the Fontanka visa center itself they said that they were working as usual. On his website, a recommendation appeared not to use the services of any intermediaries to apply for a visa. “Intermediaries charge additional fees that are not necessary without providing additional services,” the company assures. At the same time, since the end of April, they themselves began to take for registration of the record advance payment of 35 euros. Although our colleague managed to catch the recording slot only with the help of a bot, she shared her personal experience here.
The statistics of obtaining visas on the Vinsky Forum, which has hundreds of reports since the beginning of the year, says that 44% of applicants from Italy and France receive multiple visas for up to six months. In Spain, this figure is at 61%.
Most annual and longer visas are obtained in France – 40%, in Italy – 22%, in Spain – 12%. The failure rate for all three countries ranges from 6 to 10%.
In the latest July reports, a continuous stream of disappointment – people receive visas for several weeks or, at best, months. And the average waiting time tends to 30 days. But this is still not bad once morest the background of some other European countries that ask for both insurance from a European company and an extract from a bank operating in the EU – and still, in the end, they give a visa for the dates of the trip, if at all. Read more regarding the real visa torment in the previous Fontanka article.
And why you should not succumb to stories regarding the “collective West”, which practically stopped issuing visas and directly banned entry to Russians – read here.
Collected by Ilya Kazakov, Fontanka.ru
Photo: Kirill Kukhmar / TASS
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