alphaod

I live on Long Island, and I just applied for a 3-year business visa for the first time went pretty smoothly. I think I went to Russia like 20 years ago with my parents as a kid... I don't think a visa was required back then since we were in a tour group. Anyways I applied with a fresh limited validity [second] 4-year passport.

I prepared the documents I needed: (1) Fresh passport (2) Passport photo cut to 3.5 cm x 4.5 cm with ruler and scissors glued to (3) Completed application (4) Invitation letter. I printed at 100% to A4 sized paper so my cut pictures fit perfectly in the picture box on the application. For my application where I listed all the countries I visited in the last ten years in lieu of listing of hundreds of repeated one-two day entries to China, Singapore, Japan, Canada, etc., I instead listed each country only once. I guess with a fresh passport there was no way for them check, but I ended up listed about 18 countries with accurate dates to be as forthcoming as possible.

I mailed my documents to ILS overnight arrived October 9 for the standard processing. Originally I applied for one-year visa, but a member of the ILS staff called me to tell my invitation letter did not have my name written in Cyrillic and was missing the line that said "Purpose of visit: Business" (in Russian of course) and that they only issue short term visa or 3-year visa (no one-year visas) so I called messed my sponsor who got their lawyer to send me a new invitation letter within a couple hours. I submitted updated documentation overnight again arriving Oct 11. Fee was $270 for visa, $3 for $100 insurance (option), $33 for the ILS fee, and $85 for mailing them the application including return shipping. I was promised Oct 24 for visa. On Oct 22 (yesterday) I got a notice from FedEx overnight passport, and this morning at 8 am I got my passport back with a new 3-year business visa. I think it went a lot smoother than I was reading online and stuff. The ILS staff was actually pretty helpful and told me exactly what was wrong with my application and how to correct it. I got an update they submitted it and another when I was getting my passport back with a visa. I suppose that $33 fee does pay for something!

So total time was about 14 days, though 12 days if you take out two days for me having an invite letter with missing information, and only ten days if you go there and pick it up yourself.