YEKATERINBURG, December 1 The German Consulate General has closed in Yekaterinburg, according to the official website of the German mission in Russia.
“»The Consulate General in Yekaterinburg is closed. Please contact the German Embassy in Moscow,» the message says.
Initiative related to the opening of a German consular office in the Urals, was first announced by the first governor of the Sverdlovsk region, Eduard Rossel, in 1995, reports the Ministry of International and Foreign Economic Relations of the Sverdlovsk Region. Since the mid-90s, the Middle Urals and Germany have established strong economic ties. In 2003, the Sverdlovsk region became the venue for the Russian-German summit with the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. One of the results of the meeting was the decision to open the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Yekaterinburg. The German Consulate General officially opened on June 9, 2005.
At the end of May, the visa departments of the German Consulates General in Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk stopped accepting visa applications; document processing is now carried out only at the German Embassy in Moscow.
From the first of June, making an appointment for submitting documents has also changed — it is no longer possible to make an appointment directly at the visa department or at the VisaMetric visa center, applicants must add themselves to the waiting list through the embassy's reservation system, after which the embassy makes an appointment for an appointment to submit documents for a visa «in chronological order».