Two days of VISA/Master Card transactions in Russia equal three billion? There’s some funny math here, or awful high traveling costs being charged.
That's not about the processing charge, but about the total 2-day transactions' turnover. From the article:
Visa and MasterCard together processed $1.9 billion per day last year.
Visa processes about 60 percent of payments in a market that saw transactions worth $740 billion last year.
740 / 365.25 * 2 = 4.052 billion. The math is correct.
If you are wondering what this money pays for, I guess they are talking about the internal market, where a Russian citizen buys groceries with a Visa credit card. It's not just foreign travel; that would be just a million or two per day.