SF consulate closure another obstacle for Russian entrepreneurs

Thursday August 31st, 2017 Andrei Romanenko

August 31, 2017 Updated: August 31, 2017 4:02pm

Russian entrepreneur Daniel Kravtsov works on his computer late at night at his home in Hayes Valley. He says the closure of the San Francisco consulate will be an inconvenience.

Stuck in the middle of the tit-for-tat closure of the Russian Consulate in San Francisco Thursday are Bay Area entrepreneurs like Daniel Kravtsov, who rely on easy access to a consulate to keep their companies running legally.

Kravtsov, who lives in the U.S. on an O-1 visa, has needed to make two trips to the consulate in the last year alone: once to get some business documents verified.

“It’s very inconvenient. … Now we need to go to another city,” Kravtsov, founder of data aggregation startup Improvado, said of the sudden closure, which leaves Seattle as the only city with a Russian consulate on the West Coast. “I’m upset that everything is going in this direction.”

Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images.

The Trump administration ordered the Russian Consulate in San Francisco to shut down by Saturday, a few weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the reduction of U.S. personnel in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in response to sanctions passed by Congress and approved by President Trump.

In addition to the San Francisco closure, State Department officials said the U.S. would scale back the Russian diplomatic presence in Washington and New York.

The consulate in San Francisco was a hub for Russians on the West Coast, with some flying in from as far away as Los Angeles and Phoenix to use it.

While Russians don’t need to interact with the consulate frequently, when they do, it is typically for pressing reasons: a passport renewal, a birth certificate request or a background check for police.

Getting an appointment at the Russian Consulate on Green Street was already a time-consuming process. When the San Francisco consulate closes, experts worry U.S.-Russia business relations will suffer as obtaining travel documents gets harder.

“If they were to renew a passport, they would have to wait three months just to get an appointment — but now it’s hard to predict what will happen,” said Andrei Romanenko, a Bay Area immigration attorney who frequently deals with Russian clients.

What’s worse, he said, are the wait times in Russia. Now that staffing in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has been significantly reduced, Romanenko said some of his clients are struggling to get their visas approved to enter the U.S.

And for students on an F-1 visa who need to start school in the next few weeks, and those on H-1B work visas who need to start their jobs in the U.S. soon, the clock is ticking.

Eugenia Kuyda, a Russian entrepreneur and co-founder of artificial intelligence messaging startup Luka, has many friends stuck in that line.

“It’s impossible to get anything done there,” she said. “It’s just disappointing where we are going. We grew up in Moscow when everything American was welcome … and now, all of a sudden, instead of going forward, we’re going backward.”

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani