“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.
