MOSCOW. Aug 23 (Interfax) - Russia is against the placement of refugees from Afghanistan in the countries of Central Asia that would enable militants to enter Russia among them, using the visa-free regime, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"Afghanistan has just been mentioned. It has a direct relation to our security," he said during a meeting with United Russia representatives on Sunday.
The Western countries "are persistently raising the question of placing refugees in the countries of Central Asia until they get visas for the United States and other countries," Putin said.
"That means that [they] can be sent to our neighbors without visas, but they themselves don't want to take them without visas. It's just a humiliating approach to the solution of this issue," Putin said.
The issue will be discussed in the meeting between the leaders of the countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and on other sites on Monday, he said.
"Imagine that refugees have come to any of these countries. Who is among these refugees, how do we know? There can be thousands, even hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions of them, we have no visa restrictions with our closest allies and neighbors, and the border is 1,000 kilometers long. A person can get into a car or on a donkey and go to the steppes. And what are we going to do about that?" Putin said.
"We don't want to see some militants disguised as refugees here again. We don't want the situation that occurred in the 1990s and in the mid 2000s, when we de facto had fighting going on in the Northern Caucasus, to repeat in any way," he said.