I was flying to Vnukovo in something a bit bigger than a biz jet and having read your threads today, I am now not surprised at our arrival in there yesterday arriving for the Champions league match.
Having not been allowed to descend, we reached Medud ( 10 nms from the airport)at FL 9100 m ( 29900 ft) and we were not given instructions on where we were going to go next and it was impossible to get an call on the R/T which was mostly in Russian .There were Thunderstorms all over the area and we had to resort to our own headings to resolve the problems because the
lack of any control .
The R/T was some of the worst that I have experienced in 30 years of flying and there was no apparent arrival planning for the 15 aircraft I could see on the TCAS and we were giving about 5 different Moscow approach freqs,all as bad as each other!
We were "kind of " vectored around within about 45 nms of the airport gradually descending
for over an hour to then be given approach with a thunderstorm sitting near the Centerline .
There was no G/S indications and we were concerned that we might not pick it up at all as G/S u/s is not authorised and the other approach is an NDB only .With some relief,at 10nms the G/S started indicating correctly .
We started the ILS and at 5 nms the Tower told us in broken english "dont land at the airport ...dont land at the airport it is closed for technical reasons "
We made a missed approach and we were eventually vectored again for another ILS approach 15 mins later low cloud and heavy rain , getting visual at 300ft above the ground with the windsreen wipers doing a rotten job of clearing the view !
All I can say, having not been to Russia before this was a bit of an eye opener and for you guys that operate in there alot ,I take my hat off to you !!
Have fun , be safe out there