Hicran
August 8, 2012

Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev has advised a Russian miner who complained to him about not being able to go on vacation overseas because of security concerns to travel to Turkey.

“We cannot spend our vacation abroad. There is conflict everywhere. We cannot even go to Egypt,” the worker — who did not identify himself — from the Komsomolets coal mine in the city of Leninsk-Kuznetsky in Siberia told Medvedev, who was visiting the region on Monday. “But there is Turkey, right,” Medvedev responded, suggesting that the country with which Russia has a visa-waiver agreement is a safe destination.

In June alone, some 600,000 Russians visited Turkey. The neighbors agreed to remove visa requirements for each other’s citizens in March of last year, and visa-free travel began in April.

According to the Culture and Tourism Ministry’s latest data, the number of foreign visitors to Turkey saw a mild drop in the first six months of the year to just over 12.7 million. In the January-June period, the country with the largest number of visitors to Turkey was Germany. Nearly 2 million people travelled to Turkey from Germany in the six-month period. Germany was followed by Russia with 1.43 million visitors and the UK with just less than a million people visiting Turkey.