Howdy all,
I am currently in Warsaw with my Russian fiancée and wanted to share our experience so far, since I've spent so much of the past few months reading about others' here.
We came to Warsaw via Hungary. She had several EU visits and Schengen visas prior to covid, and I provided a pretty thorough sponsorship letter/documentation, so we were lucky enough to receive one valid for about 6 months. That was one of the worries we had early on, but it turned out to be a non-issue getting here.
Her interview was on July 15. Went well, and after a 3-4 hour wait + 10 minutes of asking simple questions, she was told she'd be approved and have her passport back in 3-5 business days. I'm typing this in a hotel room in Warsaw, so that didn't happen.
Instead, we're in AP. Pretty routine from what I can tell: the CEAC status shows "refused" and the USTravelDocs page shows "Document Delivery Information:" without further details.
I reached out a bit over a week later specifically because we had previous issues receiving emails from them (the appointment instructions were sent to an old email address that only appeared in the part of the DS-160 where they ask for all emails/social media from the past 5 years. She forgot the pw and stopped using it 4ish years ago). In their response, they confirmed the case is undergoing routine administrative processing, no additional documents/information were required from us, and all there is to do is wait until they contact us. That was on July 24.
As others before me, I'm having to cancel flights, extend stays, etc. while I enjoy an prolonged "vacation" in Warsaw. Because of this, I check the CEAC status regularly hoping for news. This is why I've noticed something I haven't seen much of and was hoping someone has seen a similar experience that I have not found while searching: the "case last updated" date isn't changing. It updated once after the interview, once when they replied to my email, and that's it. Others seem to have it updating several times before the visa is approved (at least when it takes this long), so I'm curious whether anyone has seen something like this and has an anecdote indicating whether it's likely to suddenly jump to "issued" one day, still probably has a few behind-the-scenes changes to wait through, or maybe just fell behind someone's desk and isn't getting looked at at all?