Agreed, very slim. In any event, I thought the OP was considering the transit w/o stopover at the end of his itinerary not at the beginning.

I ommited to check deepbluesky's overall itinerary. Since he is starting from Africa, my suggestion would violate the one inter-continental departure and one inter-continental arrival rule with regard to the continent of Africa.

However, in general terms my suggestion should comply with the rule regarding two arrivals and departures from the continent of Europe:
For example - a xONE4 of NthAm-xEur-Afr-Eur-Asa or NthAm-Eur-Afr-xEur-Asa should allow the routings ???-xMAD-LOS//SSG-MAD-??? and ???-MAD-SSG//LOS-xMAD-??? respectively.

The first has a transit through MAD from outside Europe to Nigeria followed by a 'normal' arrival in Europe from Afirca. The second does it in the reverse order - a 'normal' departure from Europe to Africa, followed by a transit through MAD from Nigeria to outside Europe.

Must admit I've never understood the meaning of or grasped any significance of the word via in the rule "For travel to/from or via Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania". The word has always appeared superfluous to me.

In general terms that is sort of how it is supposed to work except transitting through MAD is impossible when flying eastbound as IB does not fly to Asia. I agree that if you started in Asia you should be able to visit Africa and then transit thru MAD on your way to NA or SA from one of the listed African countries.

Agreed. So transits from one of the listed African countries to Asia would have to be through LHR.

In fact a routing such as LOS-xLHR-xSIN-SYD would even be possible, with previous visits or later returns to both Europe and Asia allowed.

To me it means that the listed countries can be the origin (from) or destination (to) or simply part (via) of the overall OWE itinerary. Without the 'via' it could be construed that the rule applies only to origin/destination.

Thanks, everybody. Wow... technical discussion there.

I really did not assume that the SSG option would work; I just saw it on the IB map and thought it would be good to try for if possible. I haven't called in my reservation yet.

TAP Portugal has some decent Africa coverage; too bad they are not OW. I'll be using *A RTWs as well, but to go out to Africa and back uses up a ton of miles. The segment system is definitely better for that kind of travel.

Back to St. Petersburg--

I see the FinnAir flights to HEL, but I was mostly wondering about the codeshare to BUD. It would be nice to go BUD-LED-MAD, but as it looks to me I can't take the BUD-LED flight.

If I head over there from HEL I probably won't use a segment and will go by train instead.

Aha. Thank you Viajero