mendeleev

We fly to Siberia through Dubai.  Our friends who have used Istanbul have experienced frequent, unacceptable changes in connection times that have interfered with originating flights in the interior of the USA needed to get to a Turkish Air US-based departure airport.  Similarly, onward connections there have reported been sometimes unreliable.

Dubai is more expensive.  The international terminal is amazing.  The terminal we use to fly to Russia less so.  For us, layovers have gotten longer this year because number of flights into Russia have decreased.

We fly in June/July/September and I can mention experience later.

Expobank, one of the banks we have used for Wire transfers, is now sanctioned by the USA and off-limits.

Wire transfers can work.  Raiffeisenbank's parent bank in Austria has been under pressure by the US government and, as a consequence, now charges a prohibitive 50% commission for dollar transfers.   So our son opened a euro account at Raiffeisenbank and we now transfer euros.  Our brokerage firm (can I admit it is Schwab without violating TOS?) does the currency conversion for us.  There are extra steps.  Expobank is a Russian regional bank that allows dollar wire transfers.  We also have an account there and transfers dollars to it.  Fees on the Russian side at both banks are minimal.  (They are lower than ATM fees charged by US banks to let us take rubles from Russian ATMs were in the "good old days".  Schwab has a $15 wire transfer fee. ) These banks are under continual formal and informal pressure from western governments to stop providing service to customers and the situation changes from time to time.

Now, many US banks refuse to send wires to Russia.  I have heard (don't know if it is really true it since I don't have accounts there) that Bank of America and Wells Fargo refuse to wire customer funds to Russia.  Fidelity wouldn't tell me if they would or if they wouldn't.  I don't need Fidelity to do this right now, so didn't push the issue.  Like I wrote, things change.

geekitana is right — last time i was there at least.  It’s Russia, things change but fortunately don’t change 

In March and April 2022, USPS, UPS, FEDEX, and DHL all stopped sending anything from the USA to Russia.  This has nothing to do with the formal sanctions regime.   We still have not found means of sending anything to Russia except asking relatives in Europe to intermediate or carrying it ourselves in luggage when we go there.

The situation is analogous to VISA and Mastercard shutting down ATM access in Russia to US banks at about the same time, absent anything by governments compelling action at that time. There are still a couple large and many medium-sized banks in Russia that are not blocked by OFAC and remain able to receive US-originated wire transfers intermediated by SWIFT.  This aspect of the situation is fluid and changes from time to time.

These are elements of the economic blockade that catch folks like us in the middle.

It is possible for Russians to send mail to us in the USA and they do get delivered.

The USA does require young men to register for military service and the legal framework remains in place in the USA to resume military conscription.  Consequently, the argument went, the USA would not find an attempt to avoid national service abroad as a valid reason to acquire asylum.  Back when the USA was sponsoring a war against a Marxist regime in Nicaragua, the USA nonetheless deported Nicaraguans who fled to the USA to avoid conscription.  To my knowledge, US law on this topic has not changed.

Well, earlier this year, I got a homestay visa to return back to Russia.  I am a US citizen.  My sponsor is my wife, who has dual citizenship between Russia and the USA.

The last half dozen, or maybe dozen, don't know and lost count, times I've been to Russia my wife registered me to stay in her flat.  Well, there was one business trip where I was in her home town and she was in the States, but you get the idea.

9 hours ago, millefleur said:

Ah, got it! Interesting that you can send stuff out but not in. I think if books can go out, pretty much anything can. Weird. Do you know if her book shipment went via USPS once it got to the States?

We bought the books at kinga.com.  That bookstore, which I think is based in New York City, is somehow able to import.

Occasionally, the Russian grocery store near us gets shipments from Moscow too.  

I don't know how this works yet.  Those among us who want, from time to time, to send items in have things to learn here.  

USPS doesn't ship to Russia -- although before the SMO our parcels all went through Dubai and air connections from Dubai to Russia multiply these days.  But USPS claims, conterfactually, there is no possibility to send parcels there.  This isn't a matter of formal sanctions but something else.  We have been able to send clothing to grandchildren in Novosibirsk through Norway.  Norway no longer does express mail to Russia either, so it just takes longer.  But I have a relative living in Norway who intermediates.

13 hours ago, millefleur said:

@mendeleev said that there's a service that will ship books to Russia. I think there is some small private company that will ship US to Russia but I don't know any details or have personal experience with it.

Sorry for misunderstanding here.  I'm not aware of services that ship books *to* Russia.  Recently, my wife managed to order a couple of novels that were delivered from Moscow to us here in the States.    It took about 3 weeks for those two detective stories to arrive.

For us, it is a puzzle we'll have to solve at some point how to ship items to Russia.

My wife flew Emirates, Chicago/Dubai in late summer.  Then overnight stay in Dubai (at quite reasonable cost, cheaper than many USA hotels) then Flydubai nonstop to Novosibirsk.  The layover was short or long depending on your perspective -- 8 to 10 hours if memory serves.  Just enough to lay ones head down to sleep in a comfortable hotel.

The Chicago/Dubai flight is long.  Avoid any but aisle seats.

The ability to get to Novosibirsk in two hops was quite unexpected.

The return was the opposite path but perhaps because the time was closer to the World Cup, the hotel price was higher.

This worked very well.  At the Dubai airport, one can buy a concierge service to meet the traveler at the gate, get bags, expedite passage through passport control -- the concierge doesn't need to wait in line -- and dropped her off at the taxi that I also reserved.  The reverse also worked.   Hospitality in Dubai for an unaccompanied woman was superb.

We note that Jazerra airlines -- a Kuwaiti airline -- starts service between Kuwait City and Moscow.  FlyDubai started Dubai/St Petersburg service in December.  It looks like Arab airlines, seeing a business opportunity, start moving into the vacuum created by European withdrawal.

On 9/5/2022 at 11:28 AM, millefleur said:

So EU countries are still shipping stuff to/from Russia but we aren't? Bizarre. Seeing as how we're thousands of miles away from the conflict and all.

My son, who lives in Norway, has intermediated two gift parcels we sent our granddaughters in Novosibirsk.  I don't understand the path from Norway to Russia -- it could literally be by land through the top of lapland.  It is a pain in the b**t for my son who does it for us but doesn't like to do it.  Partly this is because the Norway post is kinda screwed up and doesn't know how their own post system goes to Russia nowadays and, more than once, has put the wrong labels onto parcels he sends -- so they eventually come back to him.  Express mail from Norway is a no-go.  But slow ground shipments do work and they also provide tracking numbers.  But almost all Norwegian international parcel mail is Express .... so the postal employees get confused.

The US postal services says they cannot send parcels to Russia because there is no carrier to get them there.  The last three parcels I sent to Russia in '20 and '21 using USPS went from JFK to Dubai to Moscow to Novosibirsk.  Back in the 'teens, USPS didn't use the Dubai route from JFK but sent parcels straight to Sheremetyevo in Moscow.  Dubai (both Emirates and FlyDubai) still fly from Dubai to Moscow.  So this excuse by USPS seems a bit fact-free.  But this is the way life is nowadays.

On 8/21/2022 at 3:59 PM, mendeleev said:

While it is possible this thread has accurate information, I'm not sure.  A big part of the problem is that most Russian banks are kicked out of SWIFT.  This isn't actually a problem caused by the USA, since SWIFT is a European company under Belgian law.  I know that Rosbank and Raiffhausen Bank still operate in Russia.  I know that I can wire money from my Schwab brokerage account to my family over there.  Money arrives quickly.  The wire transfer fee is $15.  I send dollars to a dollar account at Rosbank.  Rubles are not convertible outside of Russia -- it seems to me it was always that way.  So the conversion to foreign currency must be done in Russia.  Schwab Bank doesn't do wires.  But it may be possible to wire funds from Rosbank to a Schwab brokerage account.  I do not have experience yet with Raiffhausen bank.

 

Perhaps these are options to check out. 

 

All of this assumes, of course, that the deceased is not specifically sanctioned individual by the USA.

 

 

Well, Rosbank is now (as of 1 or 2 September) sanctioned and I don't know if there are other banks that Schwab can use ...

The USA clearly continues to be a champion of free markets ... or maybe not ...

When I married, I got caught up in a decent reform of US law to protect foreigners from disgusting American men (let's admit it, they were mainly or exclusively male) who found one gullible foreign woman after another, to bring them here for a bit of time, have fun, and then throw them back before finding the next one.  (My wife was just very careful and wanted to go home to think before upending her life.  Given how things evolve, I get ever more amazed by her caution.). That's why Americans need an explanation (legally a waiver) before sponsoring a second K1.   Get it?  You apparently were on the opposite side of that horrible equation.  Count your benefits.  You spent way too much but, I hope, learned a valuable lesson.

I actually happen to agree with Biden that you cannot be for democracy and simultaneously be for the political violence that happened in Washington DC on January 6, 2020 when Trump supported his supporters in an attempted a coup.

I see irony in his limitation of geography though.  Political violence in the USA is not OK.  I agree.  But Biden's proconsul in east Europe, Victoria Nulled, is the same person who famously said, "F**k the EU" because they negotiated an early election to replace an unpopular but democratically elected President.  (Google it and you'll find it at BBC.). Instead, Nuland and our ambassador in Kiev discussed who was desirable to lead the country after a coup.  This politician is a "complicated electron" but that one is preferred.  And, after the coup, the preferred one stepped in to be Head of State.   Political violence sponsored by the USA abroad to replace a democratically elected leader is OK.  But, per Biden, political violence to prevent a transition of power to a person who legitimately won an election (Biden did, get over it) is not OK.  Who was that US army guy who trained the far right of Maiden in sniper tactics (what am I talking about:  see the Ukrainian political scientist now working in Ottawa in his peer reviewed work:  "The far right, the Euromaiden, and the  Maidan massacre in Ukraine", in the peer-reviewed Wiley journal Journal of Labor and Society, 2019, 1-25)  

Am I the only one who sees irony and hypocrisy here.

We know the Monroe Doctrine lives.  After all, Kennedy showed that when the USSR threatened to put nukes in Cuba:  Kennedy threatened nuclear annihilation in the Cuban missile crisis.  But the USA arrogates to itself the right to create a powerful allied military presence on the borders of Russia and we pretend this must be OK and that an opposing great power has no say?  And then we scupper negotiations between Ukrainian and Russia in April (per Fiona Hill in the ultimate establish rag, Foreign Policy) to stop the war ... because why?

Stop the world I want to get off.

Now time for me to ask a question.  It looks to me like GotoRussia, a travel agency in Atlanta I used to use, has suspended operations.  At least, their phone seems not to work.  Does anyone know whether this is true?  Does anyone around here have other agencies they've used to support getting invitations and visas to Russia?

While it is possible this thread has accurate information, I'm not sure.  A big part of the problem is that most Russian banks are kicked out of SWIFT.  This isn't actually a problem caused by the USA, since SWIFT is a European company under Belgian law.  I know that Rosbank and Raiffhausen Bank still operate in Russia.  I know that I can wire money from my Schwab brokerage account to my family over there.  Money arrives quickly.  The wire transfer fee is $15.  I send dollars to a dollar account at Rosbank.  Rubles are not convertible outside of Russia -- it seems to me it was always that way.  So the conversion to foreign currency must be done in Russia.  Schwab Bank doesn't do wires.  But it may be possible to wire funds from Rosbank to a Schwab brokerage account.  I do not have experience yet with Raiffhausen bank.

Perhaps these are options to check out. 

All of this assumes, of course, that the deceased is not specifically sanctioned individual by the USA.

1 hour ago, Mike20090622 said:

I will fly to Moscow on July 20 through Dubai also, layover time is 9 hours, I will carry cash no more than 10000$, if you can wire money to Russia please update, as far as I tried, nothing works, I will return on August 11, St. Petersburg to Istanbul to Washington DC

Mike, this spring and summer we have repeatedly successfully wired funds to an account at Rosbank set up by my stepson.  It is a dollar account.  We will do the same for my wife at both Rosbank and Raiffhausen bank.   She will set up these accounts after she arrives.  I want to plan for the longer term and strive to avoid single point failures.  Rosbank was a subsidiary of a big French bank who has sold to Russian investors recently.  Raiffhausen is a subsidiary of an Austrian bank.  Both remain within SWIFT.  There is business risk that Raiffhausen might shut down operations in Russia at some point, although repeatedly they have said they do not current plan to do so.  The wire transfers from Schwab were easy and relatively cheap.  

My wife will go in early August for an annual trip to visit her son and grandchildren.  The route is Chicago to Dubai (Emirates), overnight stay, then Dubai to Novosibirsk (flydubai).  We broke the ticket at Dubai and saved about $2500 with the "penalty" of having to collect bags in Dubai.  One she's there, I'll update here on how this went.  This is the first time either of us is going there not through Moscow.  She'll open up accounts at Reifhaissen and Rosbank and I'll wire funds.  At Schwab, the international wire transfer fee is only $15 -- much better than my other bank. She'll also travel with emergency cash.  Her trips are usually rather long and this is no exception:  return scheduled early November..

I've had some very good medical care in Russia, too.  I always paid out of pocket.  We're talking serious acute illnesses.  I can say the care I got in Russia was comparable, in some ways, better than for similar illnesses here in the States that I had in the past decade.

This site was incredibly useful for us 15-ish years ago as we got married and she came to the USA.  I've done the career thing and will soon retire.  What's good for the goose (living in the USA during my career) is good for the gander (returning to Russia when not constrained by work to live in the States).  So we're looking at a return this year or the next or surely the one after that.  Starting to plan, that is.

I'm wondering if there are others here who've come this far in the journey and getting ready for an adventure like we face?  We've lots of practical questions, often the reverse of those often asked here.

Cheers!

Anyone know about new registration requirements for Russian citizens returning to RF from abroad?  Are there exit restrictions?

Moscow Times reported in April that Aeroflot suspended international air travel until August.  There have been periodic flights since then, for repatriation purposes.

We've seen occasional JFK -> SVO flights (or the opposite) and believe they were solely for repatriation purposes.  If one gets to Moscow, one may not be able to move beyond the city until finishing a quarantine -- if then.  We have heard of a person who wanted to return to the USA and arrived from Siberia to Moscow but had to stay in that city for two months before traveling on to the USA.

Moscow at least begins to loosen their very rigorous "stay home" requirements.

Congratulations Meghan & Andrey. Good luck managing the electronics!

@Boris&Kassie: I lived in Tulsa when we got married, though I'd moved to Denver by the time she moved here "permanently". Tulsa is pretty reliably two hops away from Moscow so three hops away from the interior of the country. Delta, Aeroflot, and Singapore are all good options. Of those, Deltas service on board is, in our repeated experience, the worst. Singapore gets one to Houston from Moscow and can be quite nice. Aeroflot has improved incredibly over the first few years and, in my judgement, is better than any US domestic airline, but it gets one to JFK or LAX which might be less convenient. Delta has a good Moscow/Atlanta flight that offers convenient connections to Tulsa. And Delta is in the same club as Aeroflot, which may be an advantage for you, depending on the nature of ties you retain with Russia.

These days Aeroflot can be a great bargain. I just bought a pair of Russia domestic tickets on Aeroflot and was surprised and delighted how much less expensive those tickets were than normal. Delta is probably the most expensive of the three while Singapore is surprisingly economical given its incredibly good reputation.

Thanks, Victor, for that laugh about heroism. I've had Russian relatives play that role in life, too. Drove me crazy at the time.