BenNomad

Seems to be the case. I emailed Rep. Jayapal and got a response with 20 minutes from a real person who said that Ms. Jayapal cannot help in my case because I am not in her district. It's a Congressional ethics thing....but they were nice about it and even looked up the Rep who I should contact. I had made it clear in my email that I thought the situation should be solved at a higher level than simply a case-by-case basis, but that is obviously above an intern's pay grade.

Same here. Could have got a similar answer using Bing's AI chat bot. Come to think of it, the State Department probably is using AI to respond to inquires.

She is not part of the squad, but she is new to Congress and she made a remark about Israel that gave her some bad press.

I just called up the D.C. office of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who is from my state of WA but a different district. A real, live person actually picked up the phone and was very polite and helpful! She gave me an email to write to and even took my name and email so they'd be on the look out for my message. Rep. Jayapal was born in India and lived in Indonesia in her childhood and serves on an immigration subcommittee, so if she doesn't take interest in the situation I don't know who would. I will send off an email to her a little later.

She just explained to me that it's not actually a signed affidavit, but just an affirmation via email that she is aware of the consequences of changing travel plans. She's going to send the affirmation in order to get the passport back (with the visa I assume) and then we'll have time to decide what to do and avoid black lists for the time being.

Bad news update on the Schengen visa. My wife submitted an application on Friday to the Greek consulate via the local visa center. Since she's in southern Russia, the application went to the Greek consulate in Novorossiysk. My wife got a call from the consulate today saying that they will be calling every hotel, every day of our trip to make sure we have not canceled any of our reservations. And any hotel cancellations will cause her visa to be anulled! WHAT?!? I went on the Russian forum (Vinskogo) and confirmed that this indeed has been their practice for at least the past few years, but only at the Greek consulate in Novorossiysk (Moscow and St Petersburg have no issues). Someone wrote that their visa got anulled last year while in Greece (they simply changed their plans a little and spent more time on the islands instead of in Athens!) but fortunately they were able to leave Greece without problems. The consulate advised them not to travel to any other countries. The consulate sent my wife an affidavit to sign and return, and if she doesn't sign, the visa will be rejected and she can be put on the black list. I can't say I feel like a fool, because this was absolutely unexpected, but the choices we have now almost certainly leave us without a way to get to Warsaw: 1. Sign the affidavit to avoid being put on the black list, travel to Greece and have a good time and spend a lot of money unnecessarily, but cancel or postpone the Warsaw interview. 2. Sign the affidavit, travel to Greece and keep our reservations intact (and pay for them) but inform the hotel(s) at the last minute that we are not able to come (and sneak off to Poland!). We're afraid that this would cause suspicion and cause the consulate to annul the visa anyway, and possibly even alert the police. Acting suspiciously in Europe while holding a Russian passport is certainly no joking matter these days. 3. Sign the affidavit but just cancel the whole trip altogether and inform the consulate in order to avoid being put on the black list. My wife has also been reading that some people HAVE encountered random passport checks at airports within the Schengen zone, despite the fact that officially there are no internal border checks.

The U.S. also explicity does not accept selfies, but I suppose if you have a good phone, good lighting and are good at taking selfies, they reviewer may never know it was a selfie. It just seems a lot easier and less stressful to pay the five or ten bucks for a professional photo.

California Congressman Tom McClintock chairs the subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement. Try writing to him even if you're not from that district.

BLPRINT SAMAL-2, фотосалон, ТЦ Life Town, бульвар Мендикулова, 98, Алматы — 2ГИС (2gis.kz) I've never been to Almaty but 2gis is a helplful website. I think it goes without saying that taking a selfie is not a good idea.

I just sent the above message to one of my senators, so we'll see if that goes anywhere. It's seems like a situation that really needs to be solved in a policy-level way, expecially given the reluctance of most embassies to help. In the meantime, I hope you get a positive answer from Vietnam or Malaysia!

For what it's worth, I just sent the following message to the State Dept via the inquiry form on their contact page. It's seems almost comically futile to use that contact form, but I don't know who else to write to, except perhaps to a senator or congress person. "Family-based immigration applicants from Russia and Belarus in need of urgent help through a top-level State Department decision Please issue guidance immediately to all U.S. embassies worldwide that they temporarily waive the residency requirement for all family-based (and fiancee) immigration applicants from Belarus and Russia. A decision was made earlier this year to open Almaty and Tashkent as processing posts for IR-5 applicants. But those in other visa categories remain assigned to Warsaw, and for some applicants, Warsaw is impossible to reach without facing risky situations. Applying for a visa to the Schengen zone (of which Poland is a part) is possible only in one's home country or where one has permanent residence. For draft-age male citizens of Belarus and Russia who have already fled their home countries and don't have permanent residence anywhere else, returning to apply for a Schengen visa is not an option. A few applicants have been able to transfer their cases to other U.S. embassies by contacting those embassies directly, but many have received rejections, from numerous embassies, based on the fact that they do not have residency in that country. Please keep in mind that this situation also puts many U.S.-citizen family members in difficult situations. Many of those who followed U.S. State Department warnings to immediately leave Belarus and Russia are not able to travel to the U.S. with their loved ones until the completion of the consular interview. "

Not even a question now of them wanting or not. It's now the rule by order of Lukashenko. Белорусам, проживающим за границей, больше не будут выдавать белорусские паспорта (zerkalo.io)

See the post below. Showing an ID for pickup wasn't necessary, but she could bring her Russian internal passport just in case.

As a practical matter, just how does one go about contacting an embassy with a formal request? Embassy websites on their contact pages only publish a telephone number and a physical address. You can find email addresses for departments like American Citizen Services (JakartaACS@state.gov) but an email that goes directly to the ambassador? Will they give you his email if you call and ask for it? I'm thinking of writing an email to the State Department and the Embassies in Moscow and Warsaw (and I would include Jakarta too) reminding them that there are U.S. citizens with Russian or Belarusian spouses who still need help. The decision to open Almaty and Tashkent only benefitted IR-5 applicants and those in other categories need a better option than Warsaw. If @MasterCarrot had indicated from the start and continued to show a current physical address in Belarus, they certainly would have been assigned to Warsaw. But then they'd still be in the same situation as everyone else who has fled with nowhere to go (except as tourists) and who don't want to risk returning to Belarus/RF for the sake of getting a Schengen visa. When the immigration forms ask for your "current physical address" the natural response is to answer in a truthful and literal way. When you've been living somewhere for a few months months or more, even as a tourist, that place does start to feel like your current address.

Yes, the pick-up location is "Mail Boxes Etc" located at Wiertnicza 115.

Oops, I meant PLN = Polish zloty

The flight from Russia to the third country (Georgia/Turkey) does not have to be on the same ticket as the onward flight to the Schengen zone. I made some screenshots from US Travel Docs, because the site can be frustrating to use. I had made an account for my wife a long time ago and the account was stuck on Russia as our country, and it would only allow me to enter a Russian address for passport delivery. So I had to write a support ticket to get them to change our country to Poland. From the account home page, click the "continue" button. Then you get to this page with the delivery options: I mistakenly wrote earlier that courier delivery is $60. It's 59 PLE, which is only about $14. I'll probably choose courier delivery and use our hotel adress. Btw I highly doubt that the couriers speak only Polish (as is mentioned in the screenshot info). I'll get a Polish sim card when we get there so we have a local number to be contacted by.

All the contact info is here on this pdf (this is from the US Embassy in Warsaw): INSTRUCTIONS FOR IMMIGRANT VISA APPLICANTS (usembassy.gov) Page 3 has the Moscow info

Foreign accounts (like USD, EUR) in your wife's name are good too. You can buy the tickets separately. If it's not difficult for your wife to get to Moscow for the med exam, I think 14 days is more than enough for Warsaw (unless the case goes into administrative review for some reason). We scheduled the med exam in Warsaw 5 days before the interview and that works great for us. I registered on US Travel Docs per instructions from the Warsaw Embassy and you have to indicate how you want to get your passport. You can pick up at Mail Boxes etc. and they say 3-4 working days, or you can pay $60 for a UPS courier delivery but they don't say how fast that is, and you need an address. There are other posts here from others who did the interview who said they got the passport back in 1-2 days. Whether the courier delivery makes it faster, I don't know. I don't think she is required to have a plane ticket originating from Russia in order to apply for the visa. But I would suggest directing questions like that to Forum Vinskogo.

The visa center provided instructions that all the filled-out pages need to be copied but my wife went ahead and copied all the pages from both passports.

My wife wouldn't have qualified without a sponsor because we had intentionally left very little money in her Russian account. The lady at the visa center said that 180,000 RUB (or around $2000) is the minimum amount to qualify for a visa. That must depend on the length of the trip though, because that amount wouldn't even cover the hotels I booked. Without a sponsor, they also like to see a statement from work showing a good income, and that the money in the bank wasn't deposited a day before the appointment. I had planned this a few months in advance, to have a good average monthly bank balance. We bought non-refundable plane tickets Sochi-Istanbul-Athens for my wife and kids because I'm afraid if we waited until we got the visa, the prices would be much higher, or there'd be no seats left. The return ticket to Istanbul for my wife is 99% refundable and I will cancel that. I will cancel all the hotel bookings except the first night. I made sure that my wife's name is on all the bookings (learned that lesson applying for a visa to Cyprus last year). It looks strange that my wife has a ticket to Greece with kids and an outward ticket without them (or me), but apparently this is not a problem. On Forum Vinskogo, people spend a lot of time discussing proposed travel itineraries, since rejections can be based on a poorly planned trip (like 10 days in one city). So I looked up the best sights to see in Greece, planned a road trip that would take us through the country for 8-9 days, and then a ferry to Crete for 3 days. That gave me about 6-7 days after our Warsaw interview, knowing that Greece tends to give visas only for the specified days of travel. To feel safer I decided to tack on three more days to the trip and booked three nights in Rome, with the flight back to Istanbul from Rome. On the Russian forum they advise against doing this (showing multiple countries) but I think that's what I really would want to do if we were doing the trip. It's all so crazy, this planning and booking and guessing... My wife paid for courier delivery of the passport and hopefully we'll hear back in a week or two. In total it cost almost $150 (visa and service fees plus delivery).

For anyone applying for a Schengen visa and designating a sponsor as the one paying travel expenses, I found out there are a few extra things that need tp be provided: 1. A short letter (in Russian language) signed and dated by the sponsor, guaranteeing that he/she will pay all the expenses of the trip. 2. Photocopy of marriage certificate (if the sponsor is a spouse obviously) 3. Photocopy of sponsor's passport 4. They asked for a copy of my (the sponsor's) birth certificate but didn't require it. I was able to email these to my wife while she was still at the visa center today, and she got the application submitted. Keeping our fingers crossed now! The other documents we had prepared in advance (we applied for a visa to Greece): 1. My recent U.S. bank statements 2. Plane tickets from the RF to Athens, and a return ticket only to Istanbul (tickets for my wife only). 3. Hotel reservations for 17 nights (the proposed travel plan inlcuded 14 days in Greece, 3 in Italy). 4. Med insurance 5. The application form, which was supposed to be filled only in English, no Russian. 6. Copies and original of my wife's internal and regular passports. We did not submit any financial evidence for my wife since I am the sponsor and we basically have no money in the RF anyway.

Turns out I was able to get money to my wife through a friend who works for a Russian guy. He asked his boss to pay his salary this month to my wife's RF account, and I am paying my friend.

It isn't exactly like that, though that may have happened in some instances. The restriction on leaving the RF is only if a person has already been drafted. The problem is, with the new laws about digital draft notices that recently went into effect, a person can be selected for the draft before they even know about it, and they will be automatically forbidden from leaving. The chances that one person out of millions of eligible men would be chosen for the draft are very small. But the risk is there. It's enough of a risk to keep a few people I know from going back for even a few days. At least now with a case number you can contact other embassies about a transfer, like you said. Would defintely be the best option. If nobody accepts a transfer, what about getting married in Georgia? @JPLaw did it. I have no idea how complicated that would be though.

I agree. Somebody screwed up and they are not taking responsibility for it. Don't feel you are ranting! It is a slap in the face. My wife (Russian) and I were in Egypt when our case went to the NVC and I listed our current address in Egypt hoping they would take our case in Cairo. But they asked us for proof of residency. We considered enrolling our kids in school there to get residency but then I read that a number of people waiting for IVs had filed a lawsuit against the Cairo Embassy for excessive delays (and eventually won I think). So we then tried to transfer to Almaty and were rejected. We were left with no choice but Warsaw, got an interview date of Oct 04, and my wife had to go back to RF to apply for the Schengen visa. I spent a lot of time looking into digital nomad visas over the past year as a way to get residence, and therefore be able to transfer our case somewhere. But not all of them actually give you residence and it's a whole process in itself. If you work remotely you might be able to go that route if the congressional channel doesn't help. I can't imagine a case more deserving of congressional intervention though, so I hope they can solve the issue for you and quickly.