Russian Post struggles with record international parcel volumes

Russian Post has received a record number of small packages from abroad this year – but some of them have been delayed by up to two months. On the two peak days of 29 and 30 December – since Russia celebrates Christmas in early January – the postal service in Russia received 100 tons of small packages alone from overseas, which it said was twice even optimistic expectations.

Although Russian Post’s Moscow international postal exchange facility was somewhat overloaded, since three quarters of international mail is sent via the capital, the Post said it has developed a major redistribution system to transfer 10 to 20 tons of international mail a day to processing plants in the regions.

Russian Post, which has been building up its regional network of international mail processing plants, said its efforts could not counter delays from severe weather, flight cancellations – and delays by foreign posts in sending mail to Russia.

It is in the process of trying to persuade key foreign posts to start sorting Russian mail themselves, before shipping mail to regional processing centres, rather than the overloaded Moscow facility, in order to improve delivery speed and efficiency.

The Post was warning its customers on Friday that mail is still coming into Russia that was originally mailed before December 25.

Speaking of the “unprecedented delays”, it made special mention of 200 containers from the United States, containing more than 12,000 items that had traveled to Russia via Sweden, which had originally been mailed in the US in early November.

Russian Post said it intends to send a notice to the US Postal Service regarding the long delays in forwarding the mail to Russia.