Originally Posted by
Happy
This is the latest denial of Entry, not by the cruise lines but by the Country of Russia to ALL Chinese Citizens incl HKSAR and Macao SAR. Russia government made the announcement on Feb 18, Asian time. I only learned about this due to closely monitoring the pandemic situation.
As a result, we are now having to submit a legal itinerary change to Princess, to end our cruise a day earlier, disembarking at Tallinn instead of St. Petersburg. Because the cruise is booked with UR pts, the request has to be submitted by Loyalty Travel LLC to Princess. It will take 10 business days to receive a decision from Princess' legal dept. Our cruise sails on Apr 11. There is not enough time to get the Russian Visa with US passports due to it must be by Post thru a processing agency, since DC is the only place we can apply In Person which still take 5 to 10 business days to process. Not going to happen when we live in South Florida.
https://hongkong.mid.ru/web/hongkong-en/home
In order to prevent the spread of novel coronavirus infection, starting from February 20, Russia will temporarily suspend the entry of Chinese citizens, including Hong Kong and Macao, travelling for work, private, educational and tourist purposes.
The issuance of electronic visas to the Chinese nationals is suspended from January, 30.
Unless this has changed very recently, you can get an "expedited" visa on a USA passport in the USA in much less than six weeks, although it costs more. Most ot the visa service agencies that help with Russian visas offer expedited service where you FedEx your materials to them and they then submit the stuff the morning of the next business day at the assigned consulate. Depending on how much you're willing to pay, the visa service people then retrieve your passport with the visa a couple days later and FedEx it back to you. Obviously some of the visa service agencies are better and more reliable than others, and some (not surprisingly) seem to have contacts at consulates and even standing appointments to submit the applications they receive ASAP.