{"id":2547,"date":"2015-04-17T13:29:02","date_gmt":"2015-04-17T12:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2547"},"modified":"2015-04-17T13:34:56","modified_gmt":"2015-04-17T12:34:56","slug":"visiting-russia-just-got-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/2547\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Russia just got Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"

I missed this, but late last year Russia introduced<\/a> compulsory fingerprinting for all foreign visitors:<\/p>\n

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has ordered fingerprinting of foreigners as part of the processing of visas to enter the country.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The decree, signed by Putin, explained that the move hopes to help the application of law enforcement, tackle illegal immigration and prevent terror attacks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Decree…hopes…terror attacks. \u00a0Hmmm.\u00a0 How many terror attacks within Russia have been carried out by foreigners? \u00a0And when I hear the word “decree”, why is it that I immediately think of this store<\/a>?<\/p>\n

“It is expected that biometric data will be collected mainly at the visa centers, which would make it possible to avoid long queues at the Russian diplomatic missions where, as you know, people come not only to get a visa but to resolve many other issues as well,”\u00a0Yevgeny Ivanov, head of the consular department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Introducing new bureaucratic hoops will make it possible to avoid long queues? \u00a0 More on that later.<\/p>\n

The move comes after the Foreign Ministry proposed to introduce biometric data for foreigners entering Russia, in response to the EU’s proposed plan to take fingerprints of all Russians\u00a0wishing to enter the Schengen area in Europe from 2015.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is half the problem with Russian immigration laws: most of them are retaliatory. \u00a0Now I’m the last person to defend western immigration requirements, and the UK’s are as dumbassed as anywhere’s, but deciding to introduce additional hurdles for visitors to Russia in response to EU proposals is simply stupid. \u00a0Putin may not have noticed but his currency collapsed recently and the Russian economy – so dependent on imports – is in the shit. \u00a0One of the best ways to bring in hard currency is to get tourists to come and swap their Euros, Dollars, and Pounds for Rubles, and this will be much easier to do with a weak domestic currency. \u00a0Erecting barriers to make the entry of those tourists harder makes no sense whatsoever, but then Russians appear content with being poorer and less well-fed in return for being able to engage in ineffectual political posturing.<\/p>\n

I heard about this new requirement because a British friend of mine is currently going through the visa application process, and had to go to the Russian embassy in person to get fingerprinted. \u00a0The agent advised that delays of up to an hour could be expected (so much for avoiding long queues), only when he got near the front of the queue the whole system packed up and he was told “to come back tomorrow”. \u00a0So far, so Russian. \u00a0Fortunately he lives in London and so this was easy enough, but anyone coming from say Manchester and visiting one of the two centres – located in Edinburgh and London – would have had to buy another train ticket or book a hotel, and take another day off work.<\/p>\n

And this is where Russia is going badly wrong. \u00a0There are a handful of people who want to visit Russia, and they will go through this pantomime one way or the other. \u00a0But Russia loses out on the speculative tourists who plan to go “somewhere” and then look at their options. \u00a0A few years back another friend thought about going to St. Petersburg for a weekend and asked me what was involved. \u00a0By the time I had gotten halfway through the letter of invitation, the agent, the $100-$200 fee, the form-filling, the requirement to have a hotel booking, the registration on arrival, and the rest of it, he’d already said “Nah, forget it, I’ll go somewhere else”<\/em>\u00a0(and the fee has gone up since the fingerprint requirement came in). \u00a0So much of European travel is people looking for quick, easy breaks. \u00a0When people have a choice of Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Krakow and a dozens of smaller cities in Eastern Europe that they can visit without a visa, why would anyone who wasn’t specifically\u00a0interested in Russia go there? \u00a0The Ukrainians figured this out back in 2005, and allowed EU citizens to enter the country visa free, thus adding Kiev to the list of cities above. \u00a0Perhaps more importantly, it meant Europeans could visit Ukraine’s prime holiday area in Crimea much more easily, and that played a large part in my decision to go there in the summer of that year. \u00a0Only now Europeans wishing to visit Crimea need a Russian visa, which can’t have done much for the visitor numbers.<\/p>\n

So of all those people considering a trip to Russia, how many will decide it’s simply not worth the bother, especially if the price ends up including a return train fare, a hotel in London, and two days off work? \u00a0My guess is a lot. \u00a0Putin’s decree has made it as costly and as much effort just to obtain a Russian visa<\/em> as it is to take an actual holiday<\/em> to a neighbouring country which offers better service at cheaper rates to begin with.<\/p>\n

Somebody, somewhere, obviously thinks this is smart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I missed this, but late last year Russia introduced compulsory fingerprinting for all foreign visitors: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has ordered fingerprinting of foreigners as part of the processing of visas to enter the country. … The decree, signed by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,20,3,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2547"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2550,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547\/revisions\/2550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}