Who can file here from 31 August 2026
Citizens of Russia and of the countries in Moscow’s consular district: Belarus, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan. The rule runs across the whole system and sits in the e-visa form — an application is taken by the consulate of the country of citizenship or permanent residence. With residence in any of those five countries, the form assigns Moscow on its own.
The embassy adds a filter of its own, on proof of income. It accepts applications from salaried employees with declared pay evidenced by the 2-NDFL tax statement: the full previous year plus month-by-month for the current one, with income code 2000 and at least twelve months of continuous employment. The working reference point is 100,000 ₽ a month, but it is not a hard bar: our chronicle holds an approval at 70,000 ₽. Applications from sole traders, the self-employed and people on service contracts are not accepted at the moment — the 2-NDFL form does not exist for them; the embassy confirmed this by phone three times in late August. The director of one’s own company gets through if they draw a declared salary; dividends do not count.
How filing works
The form and the documents go in online, but the package is assembled on paper: bank statements with a wet stamp, translations with a notary’s certification, and only then are the scans uploaded into the system.
- The $350 fee is paid in cash at the embassy against a printed QR code. A proxy may come instead — but at payment they will have to open the applicant’s tax account: the officer checks live that the payment code matches the salary.
- The police clearance certificate has to be the paper one from the Interior Ministry, with blue stamps and a notarised translation; the electronic version is not accepted. It takes about a month, so it is worth ordering at the very start. Children under 14 need no certificate — an explanatory letter goes in its place.
- The financial requirement is three months of statements with no dips and a minimum balance of 500,000 ฿ per applicant, children included. It is wise to keep the sum in one bank: adding accounts together is formally allowed, but in practice the consul looks at the first statement. The general form allows a sponsorship letter as an alternative; how Moscow will read one, there is no practice yet.
- A request for further documents arrives almost every time, once or twice.
- The decision is awaited in the country of filing: in late-August cases 26 to 39 days passed between payment and visa.
There is no interview, the decision is made on the documents, and the visa arrives by email.
Documents from Belarus, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan
Applicants from these countries file in Moscow with their own national documents — the 2-NDFL is a Russian instrument and does not apply to them. The bottleneck here is a different one: legalisation. It takes originals with a wet stamp, a notarised translation into English, and certification at their country’s embassy or foreign ministry. An apostille does not work for Thailand yet: the convention enters into force for it on 28 February 2027, and until then legalisation applies.
What we track here
How the embassy reads the borderline cases of its income filter, what ends up in document requests, and how practice settles for papers from the district countries — completed cases on those are still few.
A package you have assembled yourself we check before filing — the Preflight Check: $300, a written report within two working days. Full support all the way to the visa is the Solo Route and Family Route.
The state of every consulate is on the live board, and the consulate assigned to your country is on the map.