With many weekend flights canceled over the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, foreign travelers stood in long lines at Belorussky Station on Sunday struggling to buy tickets for seats in sold-out trains headed to Europe.
“I need to get to Berlin, at least,” said Bergar Dominique, a French tourist accompanied by his wife and daughter who was trying to secure tickets to Germany.
Standing next to him was a group of Polish students who had just spent a week in Tuva at the invitation of a local university.
“We hope to get anywhere to Europe, but there is no information, and my visa expired today,” said one of them, who gave only his first name, Bartosh.
With no tickets available, Bartosh and his friends decided to make the trip back to Tuva, where their hosts have invited them to stay until the situation becomes clearer.
The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull has led to an unprecedented shutdown of air travel over wide swaths of Europe since Thursday. Much of the continent has closed its skies because of fears that volcanic ash poses a danger to planes.
More than 250 flights between Russian and Europe were canceled as of Sunday, half of them from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, Itar-Tass reported on Sunday.
It was unclear how much longer the disruption would continue. Aeroflot said it had grounded 42 flights scheduled to depart to European cities on Monday.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Sunday urged Transportation Minister Igor Levitin to work to bring home some of the 12,000 Russians stranded across Europe, including 7,000 Aeroflot passengers.
He told Levitin to start with Russian citizens stuck in Warsaw, Prague and Berlin, European capitals close to the Russian border.
“There is a need to organize the evacuation of those people — those who want it, of course — by other means of transportation,” Putin said during an emergency government meeting called to discuss the crisis, according to a transcript on the government’s web site.
The places with the most stranded Russian tourists are Germany, France, the Netherlands and northern Italy, Levitin said, the Regnum online news service reported.
The cancellation of European flights halted vacation plans for Irina, a 60-year-old businesswoman who had prepared to leave for a weeklong vacation in Düsseldorf, Germany, together with a female friend early Friday.
After hours of delays, Aeroflot finally canceled the flight on Friday evening and put her up in the Olimpiyets hotel, located near Sheremetyevo Airport. A hotel representative said more than 500 Aeroflot passengers spent Friday night at the hotel.
“All of this is rather sad, but thank God that no planes took off. This was a wise decision,” said Irina, a regular Aeroflot customer who asked not to use her last name to avoid possible discontent from the carrier.
Irina said she would try hard to get some reimbursement from her tour operator for the $1,000 that she spent on the trip, which included her air ticket and hotel.
But while airlines have promised that tickets can be returned without penalties, tour operators are not giving refunds because of the extenuating circumstances, Irina Turina, spokeswomen for the Russian Tourism Union, said in comments published Saturday in Kommersant. She said it was not “physically” possible to return the money because the funds already had been transferred to hotels.
With flights canceled, many foreign visitors stuck in Russia have turned to trains as a last resort for getting out of the country. But they faced challenges getting information at Moscow train stations, which are a far cry from the more tourist-friendly international airports. Few railway representatives spoke English, and train schedules were written in Russian only. Many of the European-bound trains were packed.
Danish documentary filmmaker Lise Birk Pedersen, who was in Moscow for a film project, was among those lucky enough to get a train ticket. After her flight by SAS was canceled on Friday, she managed to buy a ticket to Finland on the Saturday night train.
“When I am filming in Russia, it never goes as planned. But this time I didn’t find it funny,” Pedersen said.
She said she hoped to be back home in Copenhagen on Monday.
Russian Railways has put two or three additional train cars to its international trains to Helsinki, Prague and Warsaw, according to its web site. One train car carries up to 160 passengers.
Despite the meteorologists’ warning that volcano ash has reached Russian territory, domestic airports were functioning as usual.
The airport in Russia's westernmost city of Kaliningrad resumed flights on Sunday, its spokeswomen said. “We have all planes departing, and only the flights that have been grounded in Europe are not coming in,” she said.
All three U.S. airlines that fly to Moscow — Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines — have canceled their flights to Moscow.
Aeroflot, however, is flying to the United States, Transportation Minister Levitin said at the government meeting Sunday. Because of the ash, Aeroflot has changed its traditional routes to North America, flying over the North Pole instead, he said.
“There is a big line in the U.S. to get to those flights, because it is the only way to get to Europe,” Levitin told Putin.
“If things go this way, there will be no airlines in Europe except Aeroflot,” Putin replied.