Providing Russians with the opportunity to visit Turkey using their internal passports is very difficult, said the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.
So, answering the question about the statement of the head of the Turkish Foreign Policy Mevlut Cavusoglu's department on the development of the possibility of Russian citizens entering Turkey using internal passports, Maria Zakharova emphasized that this issue had been discussed earlier.
"This issue has already been raised by the Turkish side in the framework of bilateral consultations on consular issues, during which our position was communicated to our partners. It is that the implementation of this idea seems very difficult for a number of reasons," the MFA representative said, according to the department's website.
According to Maria Zakharova, this is primarily due to the legal aspects of using an internal passport when traveling abroad. “As you know, the territory of use of general civil passports is limited by the legislation of the Russian Federation. There are several exceptions. These are countries with which we have achieved a very high level of integration. At the same time, border guards in these countries have a good command of Russian. When crossing the border with Turkey, there will inevitably be a problem, first of all, with reading the information that is set out in internal Russian passports exclusively in Russian,” she explained, specifying that the lack of knowledge of the Russian language by local authorities may lead to a number of conflict situations involving Russian citizens during their stay in Turkey.
"In addition, according to Russian law, unauthorized notes, including about crossing the border, cannot be made in internal passports. At the same time, we do not see any problems in using foreign passports. Over the past few years, the procedure for their registration has been significantly simplified. The number of carriers is growing - you can look at the statistics," concluded Maria Zakharova.
Source: trn-news.ru