Well don't get carried away by any of this just yet. The situation has NOT changed whatsoever and it's really bad.

I was at the Russian (in Minsk) embassy today and it was so bloody frustrating that I hardly want to write about it because it's not going to be very polite or flattering about Russia!

[BEGIN RANT]

Basically they have the wrong form ON THEIR OWN website and then complained about me filling in the wrong form. I filled in exactly the form that was referenced online, on an official Russian site. And furthermore, the form that I filled in, has the exact same information as the other one. The only difference is the number on top of the form.

Then they want the original of a document (invitation from some government ministry) which I don't have. The document in question has a unique reference number to a record in a database where they could easily verify that the correct document is stored. But they think it's much more logical for me to ship the physical original doc from Moscow to Minsk via DHL, which will take at least 3 days, and cost 30 Euro.

Furthermore, they have NO fast track service and the processing of ANY type of visa whatsoever takes a week.

Additionally, the whole idea of invitations is a joke, since invitations are for sale online and there is no relevance whatsoever to what the person is really going to do in Russia. The registration process too, seems to be just one huge waste of peoples time, since it's either stating the obvious (that a tourist is staying at a hotel) or it's fake (someone bought a phony registration).

Additionally, just a note - nobody at the entire consulate section could speak English. (I decided to try Crocodile's advice about speaking only English.) But it was literally not a possibility. I think the situation with English as lingua-france is crap too, but it's the reality of the world we live in, and you might think that they would at least have a single staff member who is able to communicate with non-Russian speakers - at an EMBASSY.

Ok I realise that I should have fixed this bloody visa before I left London, but this is the STONE AGE. I have been to a fair number of countries that require visa and I have never encountered anything like this. The Belarus visa took 2 days in total. That is reasonable. 1 for the invitation and one to get the visa into the passport.

I have no idea how Russians are treated when they apply for EU visas, but if the process is half as ridiculous as that for Russian visas, then I am really ashamed.

I am going to go to Vitebsk in North Eastern Belarus and have the document delivered to me there. Once I recieve it, I will consider whether I am going to bother going to Russia or not. I REALLY wanted to and I could never dream it would be so bloody hard! I have already been to Ru for goodness sake, and it was simpler then, in the days of the USSR which everyone thinks is was so bureacratic and useless. But at least they could give a person from a nearby country a flipping visa in 24 hours, which is more than can be said about Russia at the moment!

I am so fed up with this crap now that I have almost lost my interest in going there.

[END OF RANT!!]