No fast lifting of air journey limitations: Russian envoy
Serkan Demirtaş – ANKARA
The superior information about the return of Russian travellers to the Turkish resorts will have to wait a small for a longer time owing to the continued pandemic risk, Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey has said, though informing that Moscow is thinking of lifting the air journey restriction but it will not be rapid.
“Now the COVID-19 studies have a craze of likely down in Turkey – steadily but slowly. So our capable authorities begin looking at the lifting of constraints. This is what the Turkish delegation went for to Moscow very last 7 days. Dates? Not nevertheless, not so fast,” Ambassador Aleksei V. Erkhov told the Hürriyet Everyday News in an job interview around the weekend.
Russia has restricted air vacation to Turkey amongst April 15 and June 1 thanks to a surge in the selection of new coronavirus circumstances in Turkey. There are experiences that Russian authorities are planning to increase the flight ban to Turkey at the price of depriving Turkish resorts of hundreds of thousands of Russian vacationers this time.
Tourism is Turkey’s just one of the major hard dollars means. In a world ahead of the pandemic, Turkey was earning about $40 billion from tourism, but this figure dropped to about $14 billion past calendar year.
Underlining that the condition relating to the pandemic is still quite uneasy and unpredictable, Erkhov pressured, “We all bear in mind the events of the previous year when we were being also making an attempt to guess when the vacationer time could and would open up. We were waiting around and waiting around – initial June, then July, but for the air traffic from Russia, the period opened fully only on Aug. 10.”
Russians contributed to Turkish tourism in 2020
In spite of these difficulties in 2020, much more than 1.5 million Russian visitors came to Turkish resorts and were being at the to start with spot between international friends, the ambassador recalled, incorporating, “So we manufactured our contribution – and not a smaller a person – to the Turkish inns and tourists’ sector to endure.”
“This yr, the predicament turned even worse – just remember the terrifying digits of April and early May possibly – 60,000 newly positively examined each individual day!” he underlined even though recalling the a few-7 days strict lockdown Turkey had to impose to curb the spread of the virus.
“The pandemic is nonetheless there, there are individuals dying every single working day and thousands of checks are observed to be optimistic. So, the issue is under day-to-day handle of our countries’ companies which are underneath obligation to act responsibly, thoroughly ensuring the community wellness in the two international locations as properly as the security of vacationers coming to the South,” Erkhov claimed.
Citing Turkish Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy who claimed that “Russia and Turkey will keep a assembly in the coming months to achieve a final arrangement on the day of the Russian delegation’s go to to Turkey that is predicted to concentration on evaluating prospective customers for resuming the air vacation, at present suspended amid the pandemic,” the ambassador explained: “I feel these words and phrases evidently and correctly explain what we are meant to do in the nearest future. So, we have most possibly to wait around just a minimal bit a lot more to listen to the good information.”
Stress around the Crimean Tatars, Circassian exiles
On reviews that the Russian restrictions may be a political response to Turkey’s close cooperation with Ukraine, the envoy reported: “Ask this concern to people who say so. As for me, I never did and never thought it to be true.”
A different existing issue concerning Turkey and Russia is the latter’s response to a Turkish International Ministry’s assertion with regards to the anniversaries of the Crimean Tatars and Circassian exiles.
Russian International Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova experienced criticized Ankara for “trying to use the biased interpretation of historical situations for destructive reasons and in an try to fulfill its possess political ambitions.”
“If this rhetoric carries on, we will also have to spend interest to comparable challenges in Turkey. We would not like to do this, so I hope the Turkish Overseas Ministry will listen to us today,” she stated.
On a issue about what Zakharova intended, Erkhov drew awareness to the simple fact the two International Minister Sergey Lavrov and Zakharova stressed in their new statements about the primordial significance which Russia attaches to the relations of mutually advantageous cooperation existing amongst the two countries.
“We actually treatment about these relations and would like quite much to go on operating jointly for their even further development, serving the aims of a superior long term for our peoples,” he mentioned.
‘When Russia, Turkey agree’
“When Russia and Turkey agree – we realize results we deliver peace, stability and effectively-becoming. Examples are apparent and several – Syria, Libya, Caucasus and so forth. And, by the way, the financial cooperation too, as well as tourism — men and women get what they will need,” Erkhov recalled.
Recalling the very long historical relations of Turks and Russians, the ambassador underlined, “As for history… Normally, it is often current in our relations – more than a few hundreds of years of wars and conflicts just cannot go devoid of a trace.”
There are a lot of historic recollections that remain in peoples’ minds, and perhaps not the greatest kinds, as well as quite a few myths, legends and stereotypes that are however lingering on in what can be reported “public mood,” he stated, inquiring, “What to do with them? Of study course, one can tenderly cherish the wounds of the earlier and even check out to adjust them to someone’s today’s political or own aims. Some behave just like that, and at times they seriously finish up in getting a scapegoat to blame for all their historic problems and troubles.”
‘History form of turned back politics’
Relevant to this, he also cited a proverb that goes “history is a kind of turned again politics,” which according to Erkhov signifies, “that if anyone someway tends to accuse the other individuals of their earlier sins and evils – real or imagined – it might convert out that he will have to listen to one thing about himself in return.”
“It’s a two-way avenue, you know. But this kind of a road, accusations and even indemnification demands, which I am deeply convinced, qualified prospects to nowhere. This is why I join my voice to those who say, and they are really quite a few right here, in Turkey, who feel that record have to belong to historians, to experts, and we all, drawing required classes from heritage, should glance forward – to the far better potential ensured by joint efforts of peoples,” he extra.