Today, four years have passed since the liberalization of the visa regime with the European Union. The visa-free travel option currently has 2,144,321 citizens holding biometric passports, including 148,258 citizens from the Transnistrian region.

The visa-free regime, by freeing up circulation, offered new opportunities for contacts between businessmen, for short-term training courses, as well as visits to relatives and friends, including the diaspora, which was a devastating consolidation of the human contacts.

The Republic of Moldova was the first country of the Eastern Partnership to have obtained the visa-free regime with the European Union. During these four years the Moldovan authorities have shared with the countries involved in the Eastern Partnership the accumulated experience and good practices that have contributed to this desideratum.

The application of the visa-free regime with the European Union has been characterized by a steady increase in the number of citizens who have benefited from this facility.

Thus, by the end of the first year of implementation, 241,415 Moldovan citizens, holders of passports with biometric data, traveled to the Schengen area; by the end of the second year their number was 577,058; at the end of the third year we reached 982,764, and for April 2018 the total figure reaches 1,469,917.