The problem with Russian submissions this year was that the files were mass-nominated for deletion. Whereas it has merit (indeed there is no freedom of panorama in Russia for monuments), and it looks we can not do anything on our end, there are two problems with these nominations: (i) users who had their WLM submissions deleted never ever submit anything else for WLM; (ii) we can not transfer all files to the projects (in our case, the Russian Wikivoyage) because the fair use regulations require that files are use on the project, and it takes a long time to add files to the list and to choose which one of the multiple photos of the same monument should be on the list (and others should not be transferred). We had the same problems in 2015, but then we were able to negotiate that nominations are frozen and then closed after Nov. 1. In 2016, several trigger-happy admins, including Jcb, took a stance "copyvio is copyvio and must be deleted as soon as possible does not matter what", and all mas-nonimations were deleted promptly in a week. Jcb then gave me a "permission" to restore the files one by one for transfer, as if I need his permission for that, but refused to do anything else. Well, specifically about Jcb I hope he will be soon desysopped (it will be his second desysop for cause) since he scews up every administrative action he can screw up, but there are other admins with the same position, and this is why many people believe that Commons is broken. No bot notifications would help us with this issue.
Cheers Yaroslav
PS Also trying my new mail address, the old one stopped accepting messages from mailing lists since October, and I was not able to fix it on my end.