Visa Information

Citizens of most of foreign countries need visa to come to Russia. You will have to obtain your visa in a Russian consulate on the base of official invitation issued by Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by request of Russian Academy of Sciences. We will prepare for you this invitation. To make a request for the invitation, we must provide to Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs a certain form with information about you, and the copies of page(s) of your passport with your name, photo, passport number and passport expiration date.

If you need a visa, please fill on-line visa application form (the link to the visa application form you will obtain in an automatically generated e-mail message after online registration).

If you plan to come with accompanying person(s), please submit us a separate visa application form for each accompanying person.

Deadline for submission of visa application forms and copies of passport pages: February 20, 2005.

Unfortunately, the procedure of preparing the invitation is bureaucratic and takes some weeks. Please note that we cannot influence the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor Russian consulates in foreign countries and accelerate the bureaucratic process. (In some cases the Ministry of Foreign Affairs agrees to make the invitation urgently for the additional fee, which is not covered by the conference fee, but we can not guarantee even this possibility, and we advice you not to take the risk and to save these money following the deadline.) A simple letter from our institute will not be considered at the consulate. When you receive the official invitation, it will also take some time to obtain the visa in the consulate. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask you to submit us visa application forms and copies of your passport pages at your earliest convenience, and not later than on February 1st. Please note that we cannot start the procedure until we receive all the data requested and a copy of your passport page(s).

Important: Please, check that your medical insurance is valid in Russia.

You may find at http://studyrussian.com list of Russian consulates with their coordinates but please do check it since consulates move. Please contact the consulate where you will pick up your visa and ask them if a fax copy of official invitation is sufficient to obtain a visa. We kindly ask you to answer this question in the visa application form. In some Russian consulates (e.g. in The Netherlands, Italy, China, Israel and other countries) you will have to bring with you the original invitation. Please contact the consulate directly if you have any questions concerning the rules of obtaining the visa (e.g. if you must come personally to the consulate to pick up your visa, what are the terms of visa issuing etc.), since the rules vary from one consulate to another and we cannot provide you the exact information on this subject.

If you have any questions or comments please write to apm@eng.abdn.ac.uk