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Originally Posted by Rads
Hi All,
I'm planning my route through to Kazakhstan and was/am planning on travelling through Georgia (from Turkey) to Russia, but have been advised that there are areas in Georgia and SW Russia that I should not travel through due to kidnappings etc. The info comes from the UK Foreign Office.
I was just wondering if anyone has had any recent first hand experience on crossing into Russia via Gerogia - especially as the area's the FO claim are trouble spots happen to be the areas that the border crossing are (see maps below).
All help and advice greatly appreciated.
Rads.

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Foreign Office travel advice is usually best ignored, or very heavily watered down.
When you cross into Russia, you enter the Republic of North Ossetia which has had the odd incident, most notoriously the School siege in Beslan, but for a tourist passing through, I think there is no real issue. The traffic cops there aren't the nicest.
Going North or West of North Ossetia is fine, but if you go east (recommended as it is a very interesting area) through Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, there is a slight increase in risk, though plenty of people visit there nowadays, and insurgency in the region has generally reduced since security operations around the Sochi Olympics, and an exodus of jihadists to Syria.
Dagestan is a fascinating area, I would not miss it!
You might be interested in the following article based on my 2010 visit:
Stage 20 – Russia & South Ossetia: The North Caucasus [2/2] | EurasiaOverland
EO
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EurasiaOverland a memoir of one quarter of a million kilometres by road through all of the Former USSR, Western and Southern Asia.
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