In August 2022, Estonia’s then-PM Kaja Kallas urged Schengen countries to cease issuing tourist visas to Russians, asserting that “Visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right.” In just two years, this hawkish approach has solidified into official EU policy, which Kallas is likely to uphold in her upcoming position as the bloc’s foreign policy chief.
There are practical outcomes to this not-a-human-right doctrine, especially for those who, as in my case, hold a Russian passport and an EU residence permit. The latter allowed me to travel across Europe all summer, visiting six countries and 25 cities, where I deliberately stayed in youth hostels in order to socialize with my peers from all over the world. I met at least a hundred new people, but not a single fellow Russian among them. Europeans were genuinely surprised that I had made it to the West with my citizenship, asking with keen interest about the political situation in Russia and noting that they hadn’t encountered Russians there in a long time. For me, this was no surprise at all.
It’s nearly impossible for an ordinary Russian to visit Europe nowadays. Half of the EU countries have stopped issuing tourist visas to Russians entirely, while all Schengen states bordering Russia have banned entry even for those with valid visas. The Schengen visa fee has tripled, processing times have significantly lengthened, document requirements have tightened, and refusals have become commonplace. Since 2022, direct flights between Russia and EU countries have ceased, forcing travelers to route through Turkey, the UAE, or Serbia, dramatically increasing travel costs.
As Kallas promised, visiting Europe has become a privilege—one that, for instance, the Saint-Tropez-loving wife of Putin’s former deputy defense minister, Timur Ivanov, can afford. But the average Russian is now unlikely to reach Europe even for educational purposes. The Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—once the most accessible and popular study destinations for young Russians—have stopped issuing student visas to them.
The rationale for such severe restrictions is support for Ukraine. It was the reason cited by Norwegian authorities for banning entry to Russian tourists, and the Czech PM used a similar argument to justify suspending visas and residence permits for Russians. In 2022, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister added that keeping Putin’s opponents inside Russia would accelerate “changes from within.” Zelensky himself called on Western countries to completely close their borders to Russians and repatriate those who had already emigrated, so that “they’ll understand.”
But this attitude is no more than a deeply troubling illusion, and one that could have dire consequences for both Ukraine and the broader international community. When people are locked in a country ruled by a decades-long authoritarian dictatorship, which is infamous for torturing and killing its opponents, they are unlikely to rebel. Instead, as it’s commonly said in Moscow now, they will “accept the rules of the game”—meaning they’ll adjust to the absence of alternatives to Putin’s wartime system and start viewing it as the new normal. That means a total shift in perspective—a radical worldview transformation.
It is a transformation that I can notice among my friends who chose to remain in Russia after the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Their standards of living have changed dramatically over the past two and a half years. Instead of traveling to Europe or North America, they now visit Turkey, China, and states of the Persian Gulf. Instead of Western shops and restaurants, they go to “Russified” alternatives, such as the McDonald’s successor, Vkusno i tochka (‘Tasty, period’). Intellectuals and journalists increasingly discuss Eurasianism and turn to the East—concepts that Russian authorities are promoting as new civilizational models to replace Euro-Atlanticism.
People in Russia are no longer shocked by drone attacks on the Kremlin or by the Ukrainian army’s invasion of Kursk, because the war has become a routine that is usually ignored. In 2022, Zelensky said that Russians should be fenced off from the Western world by an iron curtain so that they might “live in their own world until they change their philosophy.” Well, they really have learned to live in their own world without the influence of Europe and the U.S. They didn’t rebel against Putin—they reinvented the GDR.
If the “not-a-human-right” approach continues, the reintegration of Russia into the Western world could result in consequences similar to those faced by East Germans after the Berlin Wall fell: identity crisis, feelings of backwardness, and a sense of irrelevance. In Russia, these issues could easily transform into a Weimar Syndrome, creating public demand for yet another conflict. And Russian youth, increasingly cut off from the European context, could come to experience what it means to be a “Zonenkinder.”
That’s the title of Leipzig-born journalist Jana Hensel’s 2002 memoir about her East German childhood (and the life that came next). One of the book’s most emotional episodes takes place in a student dormitory in Marseille, where young people from France, Italy, Austria, and other European countries gathered in the evening of 1998 and began to discuss their childhood heroes in a euphoric mood: the Smurfs, Donald Duck, and Pippi Longstocking. Jana, on the other hand, managed to keep the conversation going by mentioning little-known GDR characters like Alfons Zitterbacke: “The others looked at me with vague interest, but the euphoria was gone. Suddenly I felt sick and tired of being different than everyone else.”
I can understand Jana. Despite traveling extensively in Western countries as a child and then studying in the U.S., when I left Russia in 2022, I initially felt the weight of being different from everyone else due to my Russian background. We, the younger generation of Russians, are deeply affected by growing up under the shadow of the all-encompassing Kremlin. Its impact on the worldview was aptly described by Vladimir Yakovlev, founder of Kommersant, Russia’s leading business newspaper:
I felt like I was missing something … New Yorkers were constantly talking about some projects, ideas, their doubts and worries … and I suddenly realized that the large part of my brain consumed by thoughts about the Kremlin was completely free in them. They used that space for something else.
This revelation, Yakovlev said, was what ultimately drove him to emigrate from Russia.
Russia’s Gen Z bears a collective trauma, as our formative years coincided with the latter half of the 2010s—after the annexation of Crimea and the rise of anti-Western, neo-Soviet narratives in society. Young Russians were the ones who resisted them most strongly: my generation led the major protests of 2017-19 and 2021. We did so because we had grown up in the 2000s—during a period of Russian-Western rapprochement, when even Putin entertained the idea of Russia joining NATO—and we didn’t want to see our country transform into a USSR 2.0. Lucian Kim wrote of this in Foreign Policy, describing his experience of life in Moscow as NPR’s local bureau chief in 2017:
The young people I met struck me with their sophistication and awareness of the wider world around them. They were students and entrepreneurs, fashion designers and musicians. They lived on the internet, traveled abroad, and shared the sensibilities and lifestyles of their peers elsewhere in Europe and in North America. What I found so surprising was how different this new generation was compared to young Russians I had encountered in the past.
It is this generation on which the EU should bet if it hopes to see a future Russia as a peaceful, law-governed state. Instead, the bloc is making life even more difficult for young Russians, effectively pushing them into Putin’s arms by erecting barriers to education abroad and restricting ordinary tourism—avenues through which Russian youth could connect with their Western peers and feel closer to the European community.
To achieve this, there is no need to grant young Russians residence permits or provide them with benefits. If, for example, one of the Baltic countries were merely to open its land border to young Russian tourists during the summer season—even as an exception—and if European embassies issued short-term visas for them through a simplified process, it could yield significant results.
Within a few years of such a program, tens of thousands of young people from across Russia could likely afford to travel through Europe as low-budget backpackers during their summer holidays—just like their peers elsewhere in the world. This seemingly modest initiative could have, in my opinion, at least three fateful consequences:
In the first place, Zelensky’s argument that Russians “will understand” and change their philosophy under the influence of isolated life in Russia is based on the idea that the environment shapes human desires. I agree with this notion, though I interpret it somewhat differently than the Ukrainian president does. Over the past 200 years, Russia has seen two significant attempts to challenge autocracy in favor of liberal reforms and limits on power: the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 and the Snow Revolution in 2011. In both cases, the uprisings were inspired by Western examples: in 1825, they were driven by the military elite who, during the Napoleonic Wars, observed how much more developed and free European countries were compared to the Russian Empire; in 2011, the new Russian middle class, accustomed to Western standards of living and respect through their travels in the 2000s, demanded the same from their own government. It’s time to show Russia’s Gen Z just how much higher living standards in Europe are compared to those in Russia or the Asian countries they travel to. This would make it much more difficult for the Kremlin to persuade young people that Iran and North Korea are genuinely legitimate role models.
To my second point, I recently interviewed Andrey Kozyrev, the first foreign minister of post-Soviet Russia, who told me that living in the West has given me a much more nuanced understanding of concepts like democracy and market economy compared to the young reformers of Boris Yeltsin’s 1990s government: “You see, for example, how democracy actually works, and you won’t present an idealized picture to people. You’ll acknowledge that it’s a complex system with its own specific shortcomings. We didn’t have that insight; we were guided by books and theory.” Unfortunately, this ‘bookishness’ also applies to most Russians, including young people. The experience of affordable travel in Europe can dispel their illusions and stereotypes about the West. This is crucial because inflated expectations and subsequent disappointments with reforms, akin to those experienced in Russia in the 1990s, could reoccur in the future and potentially push the country back toward authoritarianism.
Finally, due to the absence of Russian tourists in Europe, the decline in Russia’s popularity as a travel destination since 2014, and the mythologized portrayal of the country in Western media, modern Europeans also hold a rather distorted view of Russia and Russians. During my travels, I often surprised Europeans by revealing that I share many of their political views, was raised on the same books and music, and am as European as any of my peers from the Netherlands, Slovakia, Austria, or any other EU state. This is because the prevailing image of young Russians today is often somewhere between a Chinese Red Guard and a member of the Hitler Youth, as popularized by commentators like Ian Garner. The best way to make young Europeans understand that their Russian peers are not accomplices to war crimes, but rather civilized individuals similar to themselves, is to provide opportunities for direct personal interaction.
On 3 September 2024, Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, addressed a strategic forum in Slovenia, where she criticized the European Union for lacking a long-term strategy for Russia, particularly one focused on its future development after the war. She emphasized that this approach is fundamentally flawed, asserting, “Whatever the future of Europe is, Russia will be in it. Whatever the future of Russia is, it will be connected to the future of Europe.”
It is impossible to ignore the existence of Russia and its people: it remains a highly influential country with a large population and significant potential, which can be transformed from a problem into a resource for building a more peaceful common future. Relaxing unduly severe visa restrictions for ordinary Russians is a relatively simple yet significant move that the EU could make in order to start implementing its strategy for a post-war Russia.
The EU Should Not Ban Russian Tourists
In August 2022, Estonia’s then-PM Kaja Kallas urged Schengen countries to cease issuing tourist visas to Russians, asserting that “Visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right.” In just two years, this hawkish approach has solidified into official EU policy, which Kallas is likely to uphold in her upcoming position as the bloc’s foreign policy chief.
There are practical outcomes to this not-a-human-right doctrine, especially for those who, as in my case, hold a Russian passport and an EU residence permit. The latter allowed me to travel across Europe all summer, visiting six countries and 25 cities, where I deliberately stayed in youth hostels in order to socialize with my peers from all over the world. I met at least a hundred new people, but not a single fellow Russian among them. Europeans were genuinely surprised that I had made it to the West with my citizenship, asking with keen interest about the political situation in Russia and noting that they hadn’t encountered Russians there in a long time. For me, this was no surprise at all.
It’s nearly impossible for an ordinary Russian to visit Europe nowadays. Half of the EU countries have stopped issuing tourist visas to Russians entirely, while all Schengen states bordering Russia have banned entry even for those with valid visas. The Schengen visa fee has tripled, processing times have significantly lengthened, document requirements have tightened, and refusals have become commonplace. Since 2022, direct flights between Russia and EU countries have ceased, forcing travelers to route through Turkey, the UAE, or Serbia, dramatically increasing travel costs.
As Kallas promised, visiting Europe has become a privilege—one that, for instance, the Saint-Tropez-loving wife of Putin’s former deputy defense minister, Timur Ivanov, can afford. But the average Russian is now unlikely to reach Europe even for educational purposes. The Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—once the most accessible and popular study destinations for young Russians—have stopped issuing student visas to them.
The rationale for such severe restrictions is support for Ukraine. It was the reason cited by Norwegian authorities for banning entry to Russian tourists, and the Czech PM used a similar argument to justify suspending visas and residence permits for Russians. In 2022, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister added that keeping Putin’s opponents inside Russia would accelerate “changes from within.” Zelensky himself called on Western countries to completely close their borders to Russians and repatriate those who had already emigrated, so that “they’ll understand.”
But this attitude is no more than a deeply troubling illusion, and one that could have dire consequences for both Ukraine and the broader international community. When people are locked in a country ruled by a decades-long authoritarian dictatorship, which is infamous for torturing and killing its opponents, they are unlikely to rebel. Instead, as it’s commonly said in Moscow now, they will “accept the rules of the game”—meaning they’ll adjust to the absence of alternatives to Putin’s wartime system and start viewing it as the new normal. That means a total shift in perspective—a radical worldview transformation.
It is a transformation that I can notice among my friends who chose to remain in Russia after the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Their standards of living have changed dramatically over the past two and a half years. Instead of traveling to Europe or North America, they now visit Turkey, China, and states of the Persian Gulf. Instead of Western shops and restaurants, they go to “Russified” alternatives, such as the McDonald’s successor, Vkusno i tochka (‘Tasty, period’). Intellectuals and journalists increasingly discuss Eurasianism and turn to the East—concepts that Russian authorities are promoting as new civilizational models to replace Euro-Atlanticism.
People in Russia are no longer shocked by drone attacks on the Kremlin or by the Ukrainian army’s invasion of Kursk, because the war has become a routine that is usually ignored. In 2022, Zelensky said that Russians should be fenced off from the Western world by an iron curtain so that they might “live in their own world until they change their philosophy.” Well, they really have learned to live in their own world without the influence of Europe and the U.S. They didn’t rebel against Putin—they reinvented the GDR.
If the “not-a-human-right” approach continues, the reintegration of Russia into the Western world could result in consequences similar to those faced by East Germans after the Berlin Wall fell: identity crisis, feelings of backwardness, and a sense of irrelevance. In Russia, these issues could easily transform into a Weimar Syndrome, creating public demand for yet another conflict. And Russian youth, increasingly cut off from the European context, could come to experience what it means to be a “Zonenkinder.”
That’s the title of Leipzig-born journalist Jana Hensel’s 2002 memoir about her East German childhood (and the life that came next). One of the book’s most emotional episodes takes place in a student dormitory in Marseille, where young people from France, Italy, Austria, and other European countries gathered in the evening of 1998 and began to discuss their childhood heroes in a euphoric mood: the Smurfs, Donald Duck, and Pippi Longstocking. Jana, on the other hand, managed to keep the conversation going by mentioning little-known GDR characters like Alfons Zitterbacke: “The others looked at me with vague interest, but the euphoria was gone. Suddenly I felt sick and tired of being different than everyone else.”
I can understand Jana. Despite traveling extensively in Western countries as a child and then studying in the U.S., when I left Russia in 2022, I initially felt the weight of being different from everyone else due to my Russian background. We, the younger generation of Russians, are deeply affected by growing up under the shadow of the all-encompassing Kremlin. Its impact on the worldview was aptly described by Vladimir Yakovlev, founder of Kommersant, Russia’s leading business newspaper:
This revelation, Yakovlev said, was what ultimately drove him to emigrate from Russia.
Russia’s Gen Z bears a collective trauma, as our formative years coincided with the latter half of the 2010s—after the annexation of Crimea and the rise of anti-Western, neo-Soviet narratives in society. Young Russians were the ones who resisted them most strongly: my generation led the major protests of 2017-19 and 2021. We did so because we had grown up in the 2000s—during a period of Russian-Western rapprochement, when even Putin entertained the idea of Russia joining NATO—and we didn’t want to see our country transform into a USSR 2.0. Lucian Kim wrote of this in Foreign Policy, describing his experience of life in Moscow as NPR’s local bureau chief in 2017:
It is this generation on which the EU should bet if it hopes to see a future Russia as a peaceful, law-governed state. Instead, the bloc is making life even more difficult for young Russians, effectively pushing them into Putin’s arms by erecting barriers to education abroad and restricting ordinary tourism—avenues through which Russian youth could connect with their Western peers and feel closer to the European community.
To achieve this, there is no need to grant young Russians residence permits or provide them with benefits. If, for example, one of the Baltic countries were merely to open its land border to young Russian tourists during the summer season—even as an exception—and if European embassies issued short-term visas for them through a simplified process, it could yield significant results.
Within a few years of such a program, tens of thousands of young people from across Russia could likely afford to travel through Europe as low-budget backpackers during their summer holidays—just like their peers elsewhere in the world. This seemingly modest initiative could have, in my opinion, at least three fateful consequences:
In the first place, Zelensky’s argument that Russians “will understand” and change their philosophy under the influence of isolated life in Russia is based on the idea that the environment shapes human desires. I agree with this notion, though I interpret it somewhat differently than the Ukrainian president does. Over the past 200 years, Russia has seen two significant attempts to challenge autocracy in favor of liberal reforms and limits on power: the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 and the Snow Revolution in 2011. In both cases, the uprisings were inspired by Western examples: in 1825, they were driven by the military elite who, during the Napoleonic Wars, observed how much more developed and free European countries were compared to the Russian Empire; in 2011, the new Russian middle class, accustomed to Western standards of living and respect through their travels in the 2000s, demanded the same from their own government. It’s time to show Russia’s Gen Z just how much higher living standards in Europe are compared to those in Russia or the Asian countries they travel to. This would make it much more difficult for the Kremlin to persuade young people that Iran and North Korea are genuinely legitimate role models.
To my second point, I recently interviewed Andrey Kozyrev, the first foreign minister of post-Soviet Russia, who told me that living in the West has given me a much more nuanced understanding of concepts like democracy and market economy compared to the young reformers of Boris Yeltsin’s 1990s government: “You see, for example, how democracy actually works, and you won’t present an idealized picture to people. You’ll acknowledge that it’s a complex system with its own specific shortcomings. We didn’t have that insight; we were guided by books and theory.” Unfortunately, this ‘bookishness’ also applies to most Russians, including young people. The experience of affordable travel in Europe can dispel their illusions and stereotypes about the West. This is crucial because inflated expectations and subsequent disappointments with reforms, akin to those experienced in Russia in the 1990s, could reoccur in the future and potentially push the country back toward authoritarianism.
Finally, due to the absence of Russian tourists in Europe, the decline in Russia’s popularity as a travel destination since 2014, and the mythologized portrayal of the country in Western media, modern Europeans also hold a rather distorted view of Russia and Russians. During my travels, I often surprised Europeans by revealing that I share many of their political views, was raised on the same books and music, and am as European as any of my peers from the Netherlands, Slovakia, Austria, or any other EU state. This is because the prevailing image of young Russians today is often somewhere between a Chinese Red Guard and a member of the Hitler Youth, as popularized by commentators like Ian Garner. The best way to make young Europeans understand that their Russian peers are not accomplices to war crimes, but rather civilized individuals similar to themselves, is to provide opportunities for direct personal interaction.
On 3 September 2024, Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, addressed a strategic forum in Slovenia, where she criticized the European Union for lacking a long-term strategy for Russia, particularly one focused on its future development after the war. She emphasized that this approach is fundamentally flawed, asserting, “Whatever the future of Europe is, Russia will be in it. Whatever the future of Russia is, it will be connected to the future of Europe.”
It is impossible to ignore the existence of Russia and its people: it remains a highly influential country with a large population and significant potential, which can be transformed from a problem into a resource for building a more peaceful common future. Relaxing unduly severe visa restrictions for ordinary Russians is a relatively simple yet significant move that the EU could make in order to start implementing its strategy for a post-war Russia.
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