Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on Western leaders to prevent Russians from living, travelling and working in their countries, insisting that the brutal war being waged by the Kremlin should have repercussions for its citizens as well.
“The most important sanctions are to close the borders,” he told The Washington Post on Monday. “Because the Russians are taking away someone else’s land,” Zelenskyy argued, they must “live in their own world until they change their philosophy”.
The idea is already a popular one. Just last week, Latvia and Bulgaria reportedly stopped issuing most types of visa from their Moscow consulates, while Finland and Estonia have previously called on the EU to bar the country’s 150 million citizens from the bloc. Other states are said to have put Russians to the back of the queue, pledging to process any and all paperwork from Ukrainians first.
Though it may be tempting to make ordinary Russians pay the price for their politicians’ crimes, the strategy may well backfire.
When I left Moscow for Istanbul earlier this year, my plane was packed with those fleeing the repercussions of the war — fearing economic chaos and political repression back home. With their bank cards cut off by sanctions, the Russians I knew traded cash, offered each other sofas to sleep on and talked endlessly about the horrors of the conflict.
One, a twenty-something barista named Sasha, told me he had never been out of the country before — but had always dreamed of working in the West. Yet, having volunteered for jailed opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s campaign, he knew he had to leave when he got his paperwork for military service. “I hate Putin as much as my Ukrainian friends do,” he said, “after all, he f*cked my country first”. He now hopes to relocate to Germany.
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