Well .. where does she actually live? City/town? It might be the same place (or at least near) where my wife is from (and I've visited).

My brief bio: grew up on a dairy farm north of Whangarei, uni in the Tron, 30 years in IT in Wellington. Got a remote work contract with Samsung Research in Moscow Jul '14. Visited Moscow for two weeks (and Ukraine for one week) Dec '14, offered permanent job. Moved to Moscow April '15. Left Moscow to work for a RISC-V startup in SF Bay Area April '18 (via short term stays working remotely from Paihia and Nadi while waiting A YEAR for the visa). Moved to USA April '19.

I met a Russia woman in Moscow -- ok, I met a *lot* of women in Moscow, but I married one -- and she's been living with me in Moscow, NZ, Fiji, and now USA. It's now 23 months since we met and 18 1/2 months since we married in early Nov '17.

She applied for a NZ visa just after marrying and in Dec '17 got a 9 month multiple-entry tourist visa. We visited NZ in Jan '18, and then moved to NZ in April. As the tourist visa came to an end she applied for another visa and they gave a 12 month work visa, which she still has. I don't know what we will do about future NZ visas -- we plan to move permanently to NZ eventually, but right now we have fresh new H-1B and H-4 visas to live in the USA for the next 2-5 years. I expect going straight to PR will be easy at that point, but there is the question of visiting NZ at xmas etc in the meantime.

Some messages here say there is a bias against giving visas to Russians. If there is then I haven't noticed it -- or it must be really easy for everyone else!

Safety in Russia: avoid Chechnya and Dagestan unless you really know what you're doing, or are with locals who really know what they are doing. And their neighbour Ingushetia. North Ossetia is generally ok and if you're going to drive between Russia and Georgia then you have to do it somehow :-) My wife grew up around Pyatigorsk, which is in Russia about 400 km or 6 hours drive from Tbilisi the capital of Georgia. Her parents are still there and I've visited for a few days. Natalia lived in Moscow since university, but in recent years has ridden her motorcycle from Moscow as far as Kazan (800 km east) and Tbilisi (2000 km south).

OK, I guess that says something about safety. That, or her risk profile I guess.

As for the rest of Russia -- the part that isn't full of crazy Muslim extremists -- I would say it's safe. Certainly Moscow and St Petersburg are super-safe. I don't know if they're NZ-safe, but they're at least much better than London, Paris, Rome, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. And it's the central parts that are the most safe. People live in the centres and they are the most expensive places to live. I think the other thirty or so cities with population around a million are similar. Definitely Kazan is (I visited there a few times).

The fact is, 99.99% of people are just trying to live a quiet life, raise their kids etc.

The biggest problem is simply that outside of the large cities it becomes more and more unlikely that you'll meet anyone who speaks English. It definitely pays to know at least a few hundred words of Russian, even if you have awful grammar and accent. I'm a slow learner, and only needed Russian for shops and restaurants etc. Once I'd been there for a year or so I got to the point that I could say something like the equivalent of .. I don't know "excuse me, please, I need repair balloon of my bicycle" (which is maybe less strange in Russian because they seem to use the same word for balloon and inner tube).

If you're a reasonably average looking European-descent NZer and you're casually dressed then Russians won't even realise you're not Russian until you open your mouth. I had people on the street in Moscow asking me for directions, in Russian, from my very first day there. It was a big day when I knew what they were looking for, knew where it was, and could give directions in Russian. If you're more than about 20 km from Red Square then people will be, basically, shocked to find a foreigner alone. But they will instantly be super helpful.

The same might not apply if you look like you come from somewhere between .. let's say .. Turkey and Mongolia. There is quite a lot of prejudice against people from those regions in Russia, and I think they get a lot of unfair attention from the police too (I never once spoke to a policeman on the street in three years).