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Parks and entertainment in Moscow: why we removed these materials
Editorial Position
Updated:8 min1,654 words

Parks and entertainment in Moscow: why we removed these materials

Here lay seven pieces about Moscow leisure: a garden by the Kremlin wall, a park in the southeast, a zoo, a former underground command post, an observation deck above the river, a park along the embankment, and a large roundup of thirty parks for walking. All seven have been removed in every language version.

This genre sold not a landmark but a feeling: a city where you stroll with a stroller, feed ducks, and go to the zoo. That feeling is real for those who live there, and completely nonfunctional for a visitor from the European Union or the US whose card doesn't work, whose consular assistance is limited, and who has a warning from their own foreign ministry about the risk of arbitrary detention.

💡 At a glance:

  • which seven pieces were removed and what they actually promised
  • why the picture of a calm city does not apply to a visitor
  • which official warnings are in effect and what they say verbatim
  • which European capitals remain in our live sections
  • Last updated: 09/2026

Why we deleted these guides

The park texts looked like the most harmless ones in the entire section, and that is exactly why they deserve a separate look. There was no politics in them, no tour prices, no hotel recommendations. There was a walk. But a walk in a travel guide is also an invitation: come, it's calm here, there's something to do on a Saturday and somewhere to take your child.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. After that date, our site continued to offer readers a Saturday in a Moscow park, and we consider that an editorial mistake, not a minor detail. All seven pieces have been removed, and the old URLs redirect here.

The financial part of the argument is more modest here than in the hotel texts, and we won't inflate it. The share of non-oil-and-gas revenue in the Russian budget has grown to roughly 78 percent, while the oil-and-gas share has fallen to roughly 22 percent (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 09.12.2025). A zoo ticket does not fund the war, and claiming that would be a stretch. But the budget those payments go into now relies on domestic consumption more than it did before the war, and pretending that a visitor's spending has nothing to do with anything is also wrong.

Why this picture is not about a visitor

Let's start with the simplest thing, which breaks down in the first hour of a walk. Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia in early March 2022, and cards issued outside the country stopped working there (The Moscow Times, 06.03.2022). Germany's foreign ministry states this in its current travel advice without caveats: using cards common in Germany such as VISA and Mastercard is currently impossible (Auswärtiges Amt).

Next comes what a park piece never writes about, because it assumes a normal background. Germany's foreign ministry warns that German citizens and German-Russian dual citizens face a risk of arbitrary detention, and separately notes that Russian authorities treat dual citizens exclusively as Russian citizens, including with regard to military conscription (Auswärtiges Amt). The same source says that German missions in the Russian Federation are in principle unable to issue replacement passport documents outside working hours (Auswärtiges Amt).

There is also a category of readers for whom the risk is structured differently. On November 30, 2023, the Supreme Court of Russia, in a closed session, designated the so-called international LGBT social movement as an extremist organization. The ruling concerns not a specific organization but an undefined circle of people, so anyone publicly associated with this community faces the threat of criminal prosecution (Human Rights Watch, 30.11.2023; UN OHCHR, 11.2023). Under previously adopted propaganda laws, foreign citizens are subject to fines, arrest for up to fifteen days, and deportation, and the law does not clearly define what counts as propaganda (Human Rights Watch, 30.11.2023). Amnesty International assessed the consequences of this ruling for LGBT people and activists in Russia as catastrophic (Amnesty International, 30.11.2023).

We cite this not to scare anyone, but because a city leisure guide is addressed to all readers without distinction and must say for whom its picture does not work at all.

Let us also say why these texts did not stay in the archive with a warning at the top. An archived page keeps living in search results and answering the same query, just with a fine-print caveat: a reader looking for where to go on Saturday would get a list of places to go on Saturday. We believe that redirecting to an explanation is more honest than an archive note, and we apply this rule to all texts in this section without exception.

What this means for you

Item

Status 09/2026

Source

German Federal Foreign Office advisory

"Vor Reisen in die Russische Föderation wird gewarnt" (translation: "Travel to the Russian Federation is advised against")

Auswärtiges Amt

Arbitrary detention

"Für deutsche Staatsangehörige und deutsch-russische Doppelstaater besteht die Gefahr willkürlicher Festnahmen" (translation: "German nationals and German-Russian dual citizens face the risk of arbitrary detention")

Auswärtiges Amt

Dual citizenship

Russian authorities treat dual citizens exclusively as citizens of Russia

Auswärtiges Amt

Replacing a lost passport

Outside working hours, German missions do not issue replacement documents

Auswärtiges Amt

Paying with an EU card

Not possible since March 2022

The Moscow Times

Tourism-related services in Russia

Prohibited by Article 5n(2) of Regulation 833/2014 as amended by Regulation 2025/2033, transition period ended 01.01.2026

EUR-Lex, Skadden

We do not write about how to get around any of these circumstances. That is trip preparation, and we do not do trip preparation.

Where to go instead

The request was simple: a big city, greenery, a zoo, an observation deck, and a day that needs no planning. The live sections of the site answer that: Germany with Berlin, Austria with Vienna, Czechia with Prague, Hungary with Budapest, and Poland with Warsaw. All five capitals offer the same combination of parks, waterfronts, and city museums that readers were looking for when they opened the deleted guides.

The overall explanation of the editorial decision for the entire section is collected in the section hub. Related texts: where we stand on routes and excursions and where we stand on winter and holiday materials.

Where we stand

We believe that the calmest texts in this section were also the most convincing: it was they, not the descriptions of palaces, that created the feeling of an ordinary country you could visit for a weekend. In our assessment, publishing such a picture without naming either the legal framework or official warnings means misleading the reader, even if every individual sentence in the text was accurate.

We also do not mock the people who walk in these parks. This is about our genre and about the state's decisions, not about those who live in the city.

We write about the state and its policies, not about people based on their passport. In Russia, there are those who came out against the war and received prison sentences for it. Our decision not to publish travel guides to Russia concerns money, sanctions, and reader safety, not nationality.

⁉️🤔 Frequently asked questions

What is wrong with the article about the city park?

On its own, it says nothing about politics, and that is exactly the point. A leisure guide presents the country as an ordinary weekend destination and stays silent about everything that does not work for a visitor from the EU: payment cards, consular assistance, the foreign ministry travel warning. We do not consider that silence neutral.

Are all these warnings not exaggerated?

We are not assessing them, we are quoting them. The wording is taken verbatim from the current travel advice of the German Federal Foreign Office, and the Russian Supreme Court ruling of November 30, 2023 is described based on materials from Human Rights Watch and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Why was the article about the underground museum also removed? That is Cold War history.

Because the decision is about the format, not the topic. All seven articles were structured the same way: address, opening hours, price, what to see. We removed that function, not the conversation about history.

Are you advising people not to travel there at all?

We do not give travel advice in either direction. We cite the current official positions and explain why we no longer publish materials that prepare for such a trip.

Will you bring these articles back?

We make no promises with dates. The decision will be revisited when the reasons for it, listed in the sources block, change.

In short

Seven articles about Moscow's parks, zoo, and city entertainment have been removed because the picture of a calm city does not apply to a visitor from the EU. European capitals with parks and waterfronts that we continue to write about are listed above.

How you can help

We do not collect money and receive nothing from the links below. These are the official websites of organizations working with the consequences of the war:

Sources

Link check date: 03.09.2026.

Publication date: September 3, 2026. Last updated: September 3, 2026.

tourism.com.de Editorial Team
tourism.com.de Editorial TeamTravel editorial team: research, fact-checking, updates→ All publications

A small editorial team writing guides for independent travel. We travel ourselves, but we haven’t been everywhere, so we check prices, opening hours and how to get there against official sources.