Kiev Travel Forum

This is a difficult question to understand first.
There are three kind of "international" train tickets sold in Ukraina:

- "Vostok-Zapad" (most common) is to Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Romania, Italy and so on.
- "MGPT" (mezhgosudarstvennyi passazhirskii tarif) is to all CIS countries also including Baltic States (but excluding Finnland, which is 'Vostok-Zapad')
- "MPT (mezhdunarodnyj passazhirskii tarif) is to Mongolia, China, N.Korea, VietNam

These are completely different tariffs and have completely different pricing. As expected, MPT is the least expensive, it's SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than both MGPT and Russian domestic tariff and probably (unsure) even less than Ukrainian dmestic tariff.

Ukraina is fully in MPT agreement and the Ministry of Transportation even pulished the full MPT tariff (helping me to determine Russian, North Korean and Chinese multiplicators), Ukrainian ones are explicitly given:

http://www.gdo.kiev.ua/files/db.php?god=2004&st=2109

That is great. We can easily see that a Kiev-Irkutsk train ticket is significantly more expensive than Kiev-SuheBator or even Kiev-Beijing. However: it's impossible to purchase these tickets for ordinary folks. There is NO ticket office in Kiev as I know which would sell them, certainly not on Tarasa Shevchenko and not on the station.

However: THERE WERE SUCH TICKETS SOLD!!!
Here is the statistics from last year:

http://www.mintrans.gov.ua/mintrans/control/ru/publish/article;jsessionid=319186643539899ED27D9677871BF1B4?cat_id=57488&art_id=57507&dayfrom=21.08.06

Please note that in ENTIRE YEAR OF 2005(!!!) A SINGLE, YES A *S*I*N*G*L*E MPT ticket was sold in entire Ukraina for a value of 127.68 Swiss Franc and a bed reservation for 80.96 Swiss Franc
(from the price and also from the context it seem to be actually a Moscow-UlaanBaator ticket).

It is easy to see, neither UZ nor RZD have great interest to sell such tickets: they are much chepaer than regular ones and can be easily used for domestic travel. Every "plackarta" fir such ticket als has to be a "plackarta" according MPT tariff and it not necessary to be for an international train because you can interrupt the journay.

The journay interruption is of course also an other "problem" because railroads lose revenue. Instead of buying a series of Chop-Lovov, Lvov-Kiev, Kiev-Moscow, Moscow-Irkutsk, Irkutsk-Vladivostok tickets a clever raveler would buy a Chop-Lvov-Kiev-Moscow-Irkutsk-Ussuriisk-Tumangan (Korea) or Chop-Lvov-Kiev-Moscow-Irkutsk-Ussuriisk-SuiFanHe (China) MPT ticket with separate Chop-Lvov, Lvov-Kiev, Kiev-Moscow, Moscow-Irkutsk and Irkutsk-Ussuriisk "plackarta", thus paying typically a third oreven quarter of the "domestic" or "mezhgos" price.

Hence the secrecy. In Russia the ticket office at MZA does issue such tickets (and often asking twice will yield two different prices - but at least they do). In Ukraina simply: "HET", all travelers are bing sent wrongly to Moscow for such tickets. I contacted recently the rail administration in Lithuania, they have no problem selling MPT tickets. But not in Ukraina.

Please, local kievliane, help everyone: PLEASE LOCATE THE TICKET OFFICE WHICH SOLD THAT MPT TICKET. It is obvious, it's in interest of everyone, also yours.

Thanks in advance!