A Russian visa ban would delight Putin

Do you hate Russia, or do you hate Putin? That’s the central question behind a current debate about whether to suspend tourist visas to the EU for all Russian citizens.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky started the ball rolling last week in an interview with the Washington Post, where he said that the 'most important sanction' that the EU could impose on Russia was to 'close the borders, because the Russians are taking away someone else’s land'. He added that Russians should 'live in their own world until they change their philosophy.'

Much as one might admire Zelensky’s resolve and leadership, his call for a visa ban is absolutely and dangerously wrong – while Boris Johnson’s insistence early on in the war that Russia’s people and government were two separate things was absolutely right.

Banning anyone with a Russian passport from easily travelling to Europe is as racist and wrong-headed as Donald Trump’s moronic 2017 'Muslim travel ban' that excluded travellers from a swathe of supposedly dangerous Islamic nations. It’s wrong because it makes Putin right when he claims that the war is being fought by pathological Russophobes and is driven by hatred of all Russians.

The logic of a travel ban is essentially Putinist. To the Kremlin, every Russian has a patriotic duty to support the ‘special military operation’ – and Putin has publicly invited any Russians who do not agree to leave the country. A visa ban works on the presumption that all Russians support Putin and the war (according to a new poll by Kommersant, only 52 per cent currently favour continuing the war, with 38 per cent supporting peace talks), and ignores the brave minority of Russians who have dared to speak out (and suffered gravely from draconian new laws) and a much larger minority who oppose it silently.

Above all, in the words of Barack Obama, such a ban would 'betray our deepest values. That’s not who we are.' Like waterboarding prisoners or imprisonment without trial, abandoning due process ultimately diminishes us in the West and blurs the moral lines between the sides in the Ukraine war.

Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas backed Zelensky’s call, tweeting that visiting Europe was 'a privilege, not a human right.' Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, agreed, telling public broadcaster YLE that it was 'not right that while Russia is waging an aggressive, brutal war of aggression in Europe, Russians can live a normal life, travel in Europe, be tourists.'

But there is a fundamental confusion at the heart of such arguments. It is true that sanctions themselves collectively punish every resident of Russia by preventing them from accessing swathes of internet, banking and retail resources that we in the West take for granted. But sanctions are first and foremost designed to undermine the Russian economy as a whole and deplete the Kremlin’s war machine. The collective punishment element is collateral damage, not the main point. A ban on tourist visas, on the other hand, does nothing to undermine the Putin’s war economy but directly and explicitly punishes Russians for the crime of being Russian.

Even firm Zelensky supporters like former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul have dialled back from their initial enthusiasm, with McFaul proposing a kind of guilt tax in the form of an extra levy on visas fees which will go to help and arm Ukraine. That could be a workable compromise – especially if it was framed as a direct contribution to, for instance, the Ukrainian Red Cross which would put Russian state employees in a quandary, as well as on a public list of contributors to Kyiv’s humanitarian effort. A better response would be to return to the brave spirit of Zelensky’s broadcast to Russians – in his own native Russian – on the last evening before the war where he appealed to the Russians to remember their countries’ shared historic, cultural and family roots and oppose their leader’s belligerence.

But in addition to the moral repulsiveness of nationality-based bans of any sort, there’s also a strong practical argument for not only rejecting the idea of a ban but radically reversing any restrictions at all. Of all the freedoms that the collapse of the USSR brought, freedom to travel was one of the most transformative - one which brought a swathe of educated, middle-class Russians in close contact with the rest of the world and allowed them to think that they were part of a global community of like-minded, modern people.

Putin would like to reverse that. He has already explicitly targeted 'foreign influence' as the supposed root cause of liberal and democratic ideas that directly challenge his regime, labelling thousands of journalists and activists as 'foreign agents'. Putin has already restricted over three million of his countrymen from leaving because they work in ‘sensitive’ industries or ministries. There are regular rumours on Russian social media that the Kremlin is planning to re-introduce Soviet-style exit visas to keep the rest inside. Restricting travel for all Russians not only does Putin’s dirty work for him but cuts off Russian society from interaction with the very world that millions of them would like re-join.

If the EU were really serious about really undermining the Putin regime and its values, they should consider scrapping restrictions on travel for Russians, as Brussels has already done for Ukrainians, not imposing new ones. By all means, exclude all Russian officials, members of the military and National Guard, holders of official ‘service’ passports, staffers at Kremlin-controlled media companies and all those who serve as cogs in the state machine. Or even throw in an age limit for visa-free travel, restricting it for instance to just the under-30s. At the same time, the EU should create a Russia-targeted version of the Erasmus programme that offers tens of thousands of university and college places to as many young Russians as possible – instead of throwing Russians out of 'technical' courses on the grounds that providing such education violates EU sanctions, as Czech deputy education Minister Radka Wildova claimed last month.

Allowing young Russians to travel and study freely in the EU and Britain would be a huge step towards undermining Putin’s poisonous and gerontocratic stranglehold on his country and counter his attempt to pull Russia backwards towards a Soviet-themed future. It would also be a strategic investment in our own future security, helping to form a new, post-Putin Russian society based on shared democratic values. But most of all, an open and imaginative travel and education policy that signals that the world is not fighting Russia’s people but the aggressive policies of the Kremlin would prove that Putin is wrong when he says that the West despises his country. A visa ban would do the precise opposite.