The entry visa to Ukraine will be imposed on Russians, starting from the first of next July.
Zelensky said the decision was made due to “the need to address unprecedented threats to Ukraine’s national security, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
The decision will end the visa-free entry of Russians into Ukraine, which has been in place since the independence of the former Soviet republic in 1991.
“Against the backdrop of the war launched by Russia, it is necessary to strengthen control over the entry of Russian citizens into Ukraine,” Andrech Yermak, head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, said, stressing that “security is the priority.”
The two countries have family ties, but the number of Russians traveling to Ukraine has fallen sharply since Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014, followed by a war with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine backed by the Kremlin.
Ukrainian border guard spokesman Andrei Demchenko told AFP that 10.8 million Russians visited the neighboring country in 2013, but the number fell to 2.5 million in 2014 and then to about 1.5 million annually between 2015 and 2019.
In 2020 and 2021, against the backdrop of the Corona pandemic, the number of Russian travelers did not exceed 500,000 annually, according to the same source.
In recent years, Ukraine, which has experienced two internal revolutions since 2004 and where the Russian language is still widely spoken, has become a destination for dissident Russians fleeing Moscow.
At the end of January, about 175,000 Russians had a residence permit in Ukraine, the Migration Agency told AFP.
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