Moscow
\nRussia is ready to work with China to make visa-free travel between the two countries permanent, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday.
\n\u201cWe are ready to work together to make the visa-free regime permanent, if the Chinese side considers this possible and useful,\u201d Putin said during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Bishkek.
\nRussia introduced a reciprocal visa-free regime for Chinese citizens in December 2025, allowing them to stay in Russia for up to 30 days without a visa through September 14, 2026. China had previously introduced a similar arrangement for Russian citizens.
\nThe two countries subsequently agreed to extend visa-free travel for their citizens through the end of 2027.
\nPutin said the visa-free arrangement had helped boost travel between the two countries, with tourist trips rising 43% in the first half of 2026.
\nChinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui said earlier that Chinese tourism to Russia had increased by almost 50% in the first quarter of 2026 following the introduction of visa-free travel.
\nThe push to make visa-free travel permanent comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to deepen people-to-people and economic ties, with tourism forming part of broader bilateral cooperation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moscow Russia is ready to work with China to make visa-free travel between the two countries permanent, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. \u201cWe are ready to work together to make the visa-free regime permanent, if the Chinese side considers this possible and useful,\u201d Putin said during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":94139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102419,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102397\/revisions\/102419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}