Finally! Brussels looking to tighten travel rules for Russians

The European Commission is preparing to tighten visa rules for Russian citizens, after Poland, Sweden and Estonia urged Europe to close the gates through which the Kremlin's saboteurs, spies and arsonists have been comfortably walking in. According to officials cited by Politico, the Commission will put forward its proposals early next year, and the issue will already be raised by several member states at Monday's meeting of EU foreign ministers. So for now this is not a finished law but a tightening still in preparation, but the direction is clear, and after a long time, finally the right one.

Last year roughly 478,000 Schengen tourist visas were issued to Russian citizens, many of them multiple-entry visas that allowed holders to travel in and out of the area without a new application. Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner told Politico that after an initial drop, the number of visas issued is no longer falling, and since it is never possible to know who these tourists really are, the Commission is urging member states to issue fewer of them. Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer said it is obvious to everyone that there are vulnerabilities in the system that the enemy can exploit. Stockholm therefore wants the proposal expected in January to arrive even sooner, while Estonia would go even further, proposing a total entry ban for former Russian army soldiers, including those who fought in Ukraine.

The tightening is being driven by the Russian hybrid campaign that European intelligence services are documenting in ever greater detail. Cable sabotage, arson, sabotage around defense-industry plants, drone flights over military facilities, and according to the latest reports, even plots to assassinate executives of European arms manufacturers now belong on this list. Some of those who carry out these acts arrive not on diplomatic passports but on ordinary tourist visas, or recruit criminals locally, whom they then direct via Telegram.

The move can only be welcomed, but the inevitable question is why only now. Europe is not formally at war with Russia, yet the Russian army has been trying to wipe a European country off the map since February 2022, while the Kremlin's services carry out sabotage and prepare attacks as far as the continent's western shores. History hardly offers an example of citizens of an aggressor state being able to travel so freely into the very region their state is at war with, and to set up companies, buy property and do business there. Some of the eastern member states grasped this in the first few months: while the EU suspended its visa facilitation agreement with Russia in September 2022, the Baltic states and Poland banned Russian tourists that same month, and Finland closed its land border completely at the end of2023. Western European capitals, however, long feared that tightening the rules would hurt ordinary Russians and hand ammunition to Putin's propaganda — all while Russian propaganda flowed in precisely through the open gates they were unwilling to close.

If Brussels is too slow, at the very least the states along the eastern border should prevent, on their own authority, mass entry by land, car or bus from Russian territory. Hungary has set a particularly bad example in this respect. In 2023 the Orbán government extended its so-called National Card work program to Russian and Belarusian citizens as well, which raised serious security concerns in several EU member states and within the European People's Party, since a Hungarian permit opened the entire Schengen area to Russians — and it is currently unclear what, if anything, the new government led by Péter Magyar intends to do about this, and when.

There must of course be an exception for Russian opposition figures and those fleeing the regime, and no one wants to punish someone who is themselves a victim of Putin. A tourist visa, however, is not a human right but a privilege, and handing it out with such unwarranted generosity to citizens of a warring aggressor state took Europe four and a half years, a series of burned-down warehouses and a few foiled assassination attempts to recognize. Let us hope that the new rules, expected by January at the latest, will be a sign that the continent has finally come of age.

Ugar