With introduction of EU visa regime about 5,000 visas a day would have to be issued to Kaliningrad residents

Vladimir Yegorov, governor of the Kaliningrad region, stated that about 5,000 visas would have to be issued daily to residents of the Kaliningrad region to transit from the region to the mainland of Russia and back if the EU visa regime was introduced. While speaking on Wednesday at a press conference in the media center of the Izvestia newspaper the governor indicated that last year 960,000 people crossed the borders of the region travelling by rail, 560,000 - by car, 105,000 by air. According to Yegorov, in 2001 about 8 million people and 3.5 million cars proceeded through 29 customs and immigration check-points of the Kaliningrad region.

Yegorov stated that those "huge" figures provided the opportunity to see, even from the theoretical point of view, the result of the introduction of the visa regime.