Traveling outside Russia with internal passports is possible only to countries with which a high degree of integration has been achieved, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova noted, answering a question from the corespondent of Vestnik Kavkaza about Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's proposal to allow Russian nationals to travel to Turkey without international passports.
"This issue was previously raised by the Turkish side in the framework of bilateral consultations on consular issues, during which our position on these issues was brought to our partners' attention. The implementation of this idea is very difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, it is linked to the legal aspects of using a domestic passport when going abroad: as you know, Russian law limits the use of public passports to the territory of the Russian Federation and several countries with which we have achieved a very high level of integration," she said in the first place.
"At the same time, border officials in the mentioned states are fluent in Russian. When crossing the border with Turkey, first of all, a problem would inevitably arise regarding reading the information, which is set out in our internal passports exclusively in Russian. Local authorities' lack of language Russian skills may also cause a number of conflict situations involving Russian citizens while they are in Turkey," Maria Zakharova added.
"In addition, according to Russian legislation, no unauthorized marks, including border crossings, could be made to internal passports. At the same time, we don’t see any problems with the use of international passports. Over the past few years, the procedure for drawing up a passport was simplified, the number of passport holders is growing," the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson concluded.
