Russian travel agencies began selling “bloody tours” to Novorossiya
Moscow - Kyiv, February 13 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The Megapolis Resort travel agency decided to open a new destination and began organizing tours in the DPR and LPR. As reported "Izvestia" co-owner of the company Mikhail Bely, it is planned to send small groups for a short period of time. Minister of Family Affairs, Youth, Sports and Tourism of the LPR Stanislav Vinokurov was shocked by the ideas of organizing commercial tours.
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As Bely said, the trip will take about four days and cost $2-3 thousand. An armored car for 5-7 people is now being prepared for tourist groups. Everyone must sign papers that release the agency from liability. The driver and guide will be chosen from among the locals, and the group will be accompanied by representatives of a certain security agency. The route can be formed based on your wishes.
The first 10 people have already decided to take advantage of the offer. According to another company representative, the Novorossiya destination will not become permanent; it is more of an event tourism. Many are interested in what is happening in Donbass. Opposite information is received, so it is important to see everything for yourself and draw conclusions, and decide on the spot who to help. According to him, the tours may also be combined with the delivery of humanitarian aid.
“I understand and support commercial endeavors in the tourism industry, but to make money from the grief of people, from what is happening here now, in our LPR?! These are deaths and tears, this is grief, I did not expect that such a proposal could appear at all, especially from my Moscow colleagues,” Stanislav Vinokurov said after learning about this. - I do not support this initiative, if our brothers from Russia want to come and see with their own eyes, support the residents spiritually and morally, we are ready to accept them. Meet and show everything, but not for the sake of money.”
The newspaper recalls that in the fall it became known about the organization of tours for foreigners and citizens of Ukraine to the ATO zone, but Kyiv travel companies were not officially involved in this, and reports of private advertisements flashed in the media. Prices ranged from $500 to $1 thousand. Traditionally, such an offer included a trip to places of recent military operations, and it was proposed to take the found shell fragments with oneself as a souvenir; offers were also mentioned to rent weapons with ammunition and shoot.
Commercial director of the Otkritie travel agency, which organizes tours to Afghanistan, Sofya Gavrilova, believes that this business project may be viable in a crisis. “You can argue about the ethical side, but technically everything is quite doable. There will be people willing to make such a trip, and on the territory of the DPR and LPR there are people who will be ready to participate in such projects. The necessary infrastructure has been preserved there and transport is functioning,” she believes. — Such tours have their target audience, there are always such people, to a large extent they travel on their own. Now there is already a large flow to Donbass, people travel and watch. There are occasional surges of tours to Somalia.”
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