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.