From the very first day of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European Union has been consistently and gradually tightening visa restrictions for Russian citizens. The European Commission has revoked the agreement on the simplified issuance of Schengen visas for Russian tourists and completely ceased granting multiple-entry visas, while almost half of the member states have introduced bans on processing visa applications from Russians. Some have even closed their borders to them entirely.

The result: 680,000 visas issued by the end of 2025, compared with 4 million in pre-pandemic 2019.

Throughout these four years, this debate has been conducted predominantly in moral and political terms, arguing that it is unethical to allow Russians to have fun in the West while Ukrainians continue to suffer; that visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right. and that Russians should be asked at border control desks who Crimea belongs to. Nor have counterarguments subsided: that such measures would merely help Putin erect a new Iron Curtain, while doing little to spark the protests within Russia that some EU politicians hoped for.

It might seem that more than enough has already been said and written on this subject (including by the author of this article). Yet on Oct. 11, the visa debate reignited with unprecedented intensity and a new set of arguments. Increasingly, the discussion is no longer about restrictions, but a total ban on visas. The rationale is no longer simply solidarity with Ukrainians, but the threat to European security posed by the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare, an incomparably more serious matter than debates over the ethics of wartime tourism.

This shift in the narrative is, first and foremost, a consequence of the failed drone attack at Leipzig Airport. In its wake, even Germany — which had previously maintained a relatively moderate stance on visa requirements for Russians — proposed that Russians be issued exclusively with Limited Territorial Validity (LTV) visas, which restrict travel to one or a handful of countries within the Schengen Area.

However, even this proposal seems relatively moderate compared with the positions taken by countries such as Poland, Finland and the Baltic states, which are pressing for an........

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