Come to Belarus for 5 days without a visa!

What does it mean for for­eign jour­nal­ists will­ing to come to vis­it our coun­try, which is mak­ing hum­ble efforts to open up to the West? The good news is that you don’t have to pay for Belarus’ visa if you are com­ing for less than 5 days. The bad news is that offi­cial­ly you still need an accred­i­ta­tion from Belarus’ For­eign Min­istry that the­o­ret­i­cal­ly still takes them up to 20 days to make.

How­ev­er, the guys at the press depart­ment in the Belarus For­eign Min­istry are becom­ing more effi­cient these days and it usu­al­ly takes no more than 10 days, some­times even under a week to issue you a press accred­i­ta­tion. More adven­tur­ous peo­ple can come to vis­it as tourists and write an arti­cle or two — nobody can pre­vent you from doing this, unless you are part of a big bad TV crew and waive your huge cam­eras in front of the pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion.