U.S. And Russia To Speed Up Deliveries

By Irina Titova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: October 17, 2012 (Issue # 1731)

The Russian and U.S. postal services have agreed on measures designed to speed up the delivery of American parcels to Russia.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has promised to solve the issue of improving postal logistics from the U.S. to the Russian Federation at the earliest possible date, the press service of the Russian postal service Pochta Rossii said in a statement last week.

The agreement is the result of a bilateral Russian-U.S. meeting between Alexander Kiselyov, general director of Pochta Rossii, and Patrick Donahue, head of USPS. Kiselyov and Donahue met at the 25th World Postal Union Congress.

The leaders discussed the matter of postal safety and how to streamline customs procedures in order to improve the quality of postal service between the two countries.

The majority of parcels that arrive in Russia from abroad come from the U.S. In 2011, parcels from the U.S. made up 36.4 percent of all the postal packages arriving in Russia. U.S. Internet stores are very popular among Russian customers.

Currently the majority of parcels from the U.S. pass through Moscow, which leads to overloading at Moscow’s international postal exchange center and accordingly affects delivery times.

Kiselyov said it was necessary to distribute postal flows between other postal exchange centers that would be ready to receive parcels from the U.S., including places such as Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, and Vladivostok.

The Russian side also recommended that the U.S. consider the option of preliminary sorting of mail by postal code into correspondence meant for addressees in Russia’s Siberian and Far East regions, and mail meant for European Russia and the Urals. Such measures would facilitate the optimization of the sorting process and delivery times, it said.

“The postal exchange between our countries shows stable growth. Russia is the only country among our partners where we annually observe a seasonal rise in parcels sent from the U.S. The issue of developing the logistics system will be worked out in the near future,” Donahue said.