For those of you who may be interested in how fast the Moscow VAC is operating, they've received our application on September 30th and we received tracking information today, 19 days later, with the note that they've sent the papers to the Embassy. I'm expecting it'll take at least a week or two to get it back in Novosibirsk.
The VFS continues to surprise me - to the downside.
We resubmitted the additional info (photos, consent forms, more money, etc) just under two weeks ago. They once again wrote not to the email we indicated as the one they should use but the other one - this time we did get it, presumably they didn't make a typo this time as the previous time we didn't get the email from them ever).
Just today heard from them with things 'missing' - one of the consent forms (I actually sent to them electronically and confirmed was in that outgoing email - so they seem incapable of linking my emails to the account in question).
Second: they asked for name in English, height and eye colour for each applicant. This is a bit surprising because this is the entire content of the so-called Appendix B
which they told us was not needed. So yes, you don't need to submit the non-existent Appendix B, but you
do need to submit the exact contents of Appendix B (they didn't ask for this appendix or the contents).
We did have the photos re-done and I admit that was my mistake. The photos for COPR are a different size and I believe I mistakenly used the photo size from the visa application (not certain but they were the wrong size).
But on the positive side, they seem to have opened our actual PPR submission and checked it for content so there is some movement. And this time they did actually write to one of our real emails and we got it.
(I'm really reaching for the positive side)