Kyrgyzstan's foreign ministry yesterday said it was recommending its citizens to temporarily avoid travelling to Russia.
In its statement, Kyrgyzstan's foreign ministry said it had not received any information about “mass refusal of entry” into Russia for Kyrgyz nationals. But it said it was “monitoring the current situation in the Russian Federation and its impact on the legal status” of Kyrgyz citizens.
The ministry recommends “its citizens who do not have compelling reasons to travel to the Russian Federation to temporarily refrain from traveling to its territory until the previously introduced additional security measures and enhanced control regime for crossing the state border are lifted.”
Kyrgyzstan became the second Central Asian nation to do so after Tajikistan issued similar advice last weekend.
Recall, Tajikistan Foreign Ministry has called on Tajik citizens not to travel to Russia. The ministry issued the temporary advisory to refrain from traveling to Russia on April 27, a day after Tajik officials expressed concerns about Tajiks being “unjustifiably” denied entry to Russia.
Tajikistan's foreign ministry summoned Russia's ambassador on Monday to protest over what it described as unfair treatment of its citizens by Moscow, in a rare dispute between post-Soviet allies.
Tajikistan said on April 28 that nearly 1,000 of its citizens trying to enter Russia had been stranded in Moscow's Vnukovo airport in unsanitary conditions since April 27.
Russian Ambassador to Tajikistan Semyon Grigoryev was summoned to the Foreign Ministry of Tajikistan on April 29 to hand him a note of protect. In the note of protest, Tajikistan expresses serious concern about widespread manifestations of an emphatically negative attitude to nationals of Tajikistan in the territory of the Russian Federation as well as widespread violation of their rights and freedoms. The note, in particular, says, “This type of action is applied exclusively to citizens of Tajikistan, which is fundamentally incompatible with the spirit and traditions of Tajikistan-Russia relations.”
Russia has placed about a dozen people – including 11 Tajiks and a Kyrgyz-born man – in pre-trial detention in connection with a deadly attack on a concert hall in Krasnogorsk on March 22 that was claimed by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
Since then, Russian independent media have reported on allegations of mistreatment of Central Asian nationals living in Russia.
