The European Union is working on multiple fronts to limit the number of Russian citizens that can enter the bloc, including the nuclear option of a total ban on all non-essential travel into the club’s Schengen zone.
This comes as Brussels and several EU member states have flagged that individuals using either Russian diplomatic cover or travelling on tourism visas have played key roles in various types of hybrid attacks in the bloc.
Most recently, German authorities revealed that the main suspect in the drone attack on Leipzig airport in August, which caused major traffic disruptions, was a Belarusian-Russian citizen who entered the EU using an Italian-issued Schengen tourist visa.
In a leaked EU presidency policy paper on various Russian visa options, seen by RFE/RL, it is noted that the “only long-term and effective solution would appear to be the possibility to adopt visa restrictive measures, which would ban non-essential travel for one nationality of applicants.”
The document notes that changes to the EU visa code would be necessary for such a move and that “these visa measures would be applied in a uniform way as EU law”. A change to the visa code would be made via qualified majority, constituting 55 percent of all member states, representing 65 percent of the total EU population.
A bigger overhaul of the EU visa code could come later in the year, but several EU member states, notably in southern Europe, are still reluctant to completely shut down various avenues of people-to-people contact with Russian citizens.
Shortly after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU fully suspended the EU-Russia visa facilitation agreement that allowed for cheaper visas, multiple-entry visas and simpler procedures to obtain them.
Brussels also issued guidelines to EU member states on how to deal with Russian visa applications, prioritizing so-called “essential travel” requests such as applicants going for humanitarian reasons, including civil society representatives, political dissidents and independent journalists or family reunification.
Patchwork approach
These guidelines are nonbinding, giving each EU member state wide discretion on how they would treat Russian visa applications. And the result has created a European patchwork of approaches to Russian visa requests.
While many countries on the EU’s eastern flank, bordering Russia, imposed very strict rules by hardly allowing any Russian nationals to enter, southern member states, keen on summer visitors, were more generous in issuing Schengen tourist visas for Russian citizens.
In 2025, a record since the full-scale invasion was reached, with 477,878 visas being issued to Russian nationals for tourism purposes. The vast majority of those were authorized by Greece, Italy, France, and Spain.
Until a potential decision on a full entry ban could be taken, the EU is working in parallel on three separate tracks on how to reduce the number of Russian visitors -- banning ex-combatants in Ukraine, reducing Russian diplomatic movement and so-called “limited territorial validity (LTV)” visas, which only allows you to stay in the country that issued the visa while prohibiting the holder from travelling to other Schengen zone countries.
The presidency paper notes that “LTV visas are presented as an interim measure, pending the future implementation of a full ban on travel for non-essential purposes.” Germany has argued for this approach and the paper notes that the rationale behind the push is to let the countries that still issue non-essential visas to Russian to “assume full responsibility for doing so, in a context where other Member States adopt a much stricter approach.”
But the paper also points out the limits with this move, noting that “this runs against one of the basic principles on which the Schengen area is based, ie mutual trust. It amounts to a re-nationalisation of short-stay visa policy”.
Limited effect
The very fact that there hardly are any internal EU border controls also make an LTV visa have limited effect, with the document stating that “an LTV visa issued to a Russian national with malevolent intent does not seem to offer sufficient security guarantees against further movements inside the Schengen Area.”
Regarding ex-combatants travelling on tourist visas, movement is expected soon.
Various European consulates in Russia will most likely be required to check military service documents as part of the visa issuance routine. There are still some issues, however, such as the fact that many of the consulate staff are Russian citizens and that Moscow, according to European diplomats familiar with the matter, has threatened them with legal action if they ask about such documentation.
In a separate diplomatic note, seen by RFE/RL, the case for restricting the movement of Russian diplomats and consular staff within the EU is also being explored.
The common practice right now stipulates that Russian diplomatic personnel in the EU are only required to notify authorities when traveling to another member state, but there is now a push to introduce a requirement to obtain prior authorisation from the country they intend to visit.
Another idea gaining traction in Brussels is to limit how long Russian diplomats and officials can remain in their host countries as European counterintelligence services are keen to curb long-established spy networks, in which diplomats stationed in one place for extended periods often play a key role.
This story was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), partners of LRT English.
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