MOSCOW (Reuters) – Kyrgyzstan’s foreign ministry said on Thursday it was recommending its citizens to temporarily avoid travelling to Russia, becoming the second Central Asian nation to do so after Tajikistan issued similar advice last weekend.
Russia has placed about a dozen people – including Tajiks and a Kyrgyz-born man – in pre-trial detention in connection with a deadly attack on a concert hall outside Moscow on March 22 that was claimed by militant group Islamic State.
Since then, Russian independent media have reported on allegations of mistreatment of Central Asian nationals living in 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 last weekend 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.
In its statement on Thursday, 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.
Russia Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Monday that Russia had temporarily tightened controls on its border as a counter-terrorism measure, but was taking steps to resolve long delays on the frontier.
Central Asian economies, including those of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, depend heavily on remittances from millions of migrant labourers working in Russia.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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