A new road from Moscow to St. Petersburg, which is expected to open by the end of this summer, could increase the flow of Russian tourists to Finland. This was announced at a lecture at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg by Finnish Ambassador to Russia Mikko Hautala.
"The opening of the new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg - we expect this somewhere at the end of summer or beginning of autumn - will reduce travel time and make the trip more comfortable. You think that this is a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but I think that this is a highway between Moscow and Helsinki," he said, RIA Novosti reports.
The diplomat also expressed particular hope that, thanks to the highway, the flow of tourists from Russia to Finland will again increase to the levels of 2013.
"In 2017, Finland issued more than 700,000 visas to Russian tourists. This is more than any other country. But six years ago, in 2013, we issued one and a half million visas to Russian citizens - twice as much. Now we are very far from this figure. If someone told me that we would soon return to those figures, I would be very happy, but I am afraid that we will have to work for quite a long time to achieve such figures," he added.
Source: trn-news.ru
