Russia and 24 EU nations signed the visa facilitation agreement, seen as a crucial step toward a visa-free regime, and an agreement on the readmission of illegal migrants a year ago at a bilateral summit in Sochi, Russia.
EU Ambassador to Russia Marc Franco told a Moscow news conference Friday that the visa agreement would help foster ties with Russia.
He said the deal set a fixed visa fee of 35 euros, cut the issuing period to ten days, and reduced the number of documents required for the application. Students, schoolchildren, and the physically disabled will not have to pay visa fees, Franco said. The document will make traveling easier for businessmen and people whose relatives live abroad, he added.
A deputy chairman of the Russian Foreign Ministry's consular department, Andrei Podelyshev, said it was a unique agreement. He said Russia was negotiating similar deals with the U.K., Ireland, and Denmark who were not party to the agreement.
Russia is also discussing the issue with Norway and Iceland who are not in the EU but are signatories to the Schengen agreement, he said.
Readmission
The other Russia-EU agreement, a deal on readmission, is designed to facilitate the expulsion of illegal immigrants who have come from Russia or via Russia to the EU.
Vyacheslav Postavin, a deputy chief of Russia's Federal Migration Service, said about 650,000 foreigners legally migrated from Russia for Western Europe and the United States every year.
He said Russia did not expect the number of returning illegal migrants to be too high. "We are not worried about this influx," he said, declining to give any figures.
Podelyshev of the Foreign Ministry said Russia had also signed a readmission agreement with Ukraine and Uzbekistan, and was in talks with other ex-Soviet republics such as Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and also with Vietnam, Lebanon and Rwanda.
Franco in turn said Russia was a transit nation for illegal migrants from China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri-Lanka and Vietnam. He said these people mostly traveled to the U.K., German, Sweden, and France via Russian territory.
