Dear Volga Passion Play Passengers, Update on your Volga River Passion Play Cruise and Tour. Please read completely. It is important to start with 2021 and what happened with our group that went to Russia. In the late summer of 2021 we had a group travel to Russia and the Volga River – BUT, not without a lot of drama. For some reason the U.S. and Russia were having some issues in 2021. At one-point Russia called back home their Ambassador from the U.S. and the U.S. called back home their Ambassador from Russia. Then later, after each of the Ambassadors returned to their embassies, Russia said they were opening up for tourists. Normally, there are 5 different Russian Consulates that can issue a Russian Visa, but because of the stress between the two countries, only the New York Consulate opened to issue Russian Visas. What a nightmare. The projected 3 weeks for the issuance of the visa and the return of our passengers’ passports - turned into 6 weeks and we still had not received our passengers’ passports with the visa. We made calls to friends in Russia, asking for them to put pressure on the Russian Government to finish our visas and to return our passengers passports. Two days later, at 5pm, as the Consulate was closing AND on the last possible day that we could still get our groups passports back in time to meet their flights for the trip – the Russian Consulate finally gave us our passports. Many of our passengers received their passports by overnight delivery, the morning of the day they were leaving. Others were given their passports at the airport just before there scheduled flights. To say the least, everyone in our group was stressed to the max and so were we! If the Consulate would have been one day later, our group would not have had their passports and would have lost their ability to go to Russia. With the tour and cruise paid in full, this would have been a gigantic disaster. Talk about a nightmare. We came very close to our group totally missing Russia and the Volga Cruise in 2021. Whatever the issues were in 2021 between the U.S. and Russia, it is going to be 10 times worse now that Russia has invaded the Ukraine and the U.S. does it’s best to punish Russia! In fact, it is already starting – it was recently announced that England’s British Air can no longer fly into Russia or even enter Russia’s airspace because of their stand against Russia’s invasion. It also looks like Europe is going to close all their airspace to any Russian planes and that will likely close all of Russia’s airspace to all of Europe’s airlines – this is going to get ugly before it gets better. Over the last three weeks we have been talking to our people in Russia about “What If”. What would happen to our Volga Cruise and Tour if Russia really did invade? We knew that if this were to happen, considering what last year was like, it would be very unlikely that any of our passengers would be able to get a Russian Visa in a timely manner and most likely not at all. The worst-case scenario became a reality when Russia really did invade the Ukraine. With the knowledge, that it was likely going to be impossible for our group to
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