“From January 1 to September 30, 2023, foreign missions of the Russian Foreign Ministry in European countries issued 225 thousand visas of all categories, including 141 thousand tourist visas,” RIA Novosti quotes Alexei Klimov, director of the consular department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It is clarified that compared to the same period in 2022, the total number of visas issued decreased by 10%, while the issuance of tourist visas increased by 57%.

According to Alexey Klimov, the data on visas is still far from the data in 2019, when during the same period 1.645 million visas were issued to Europeans, of which 1.112 million were tourist ones.