Is it fair for the West to ban Russians?

To start with, Volodymyr Zelensky was careful not to blame Russians for a war Vladimir Putin started. Appealing to them and speaking in his native Russian, he asked: ‘Do the Russians want war?’ He called on them to rise up to make Putin listen. But this did not happen. Zelensky appears to have decided that they do, in fact, want war.

So he has now said that western countries should ban all Russian citizens from entering their countries on the grounds that ‘the population picked this government and they’re not fighting it’. His foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russians ‘must be deprived of the right to cross international borders until they learn to respect them’.

His idea is gathering momentum with Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic, who have already banned the issue of all kinds of visas to Russians.