The Financial Times writes that the European Union is preparing to suspend the agreement with Russia on travel visas this week.

As the Financial Times reports, the plan to freeze the 2007 agreement between the EU and Russia will make it more difficult and expensive for Russian citizens to obtain documents for entry into the Schengen area.

The move comes after some eastern EU member states threatened to unilaterally close their borders to Russian tourists, while other countries called for collective action across the EU bloc to ban ordinary Russians from traveling to the European Union on the grounds that the tourists are at fault. Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi called for a complete ban on Russians.

Three European officials involved in the talks told the Financial Times that, as a first step, EU ministers plan to announce their political support for suspending the EU-Russia visa facilitation agreement at a two-day meeting in Prague starting on Tuesday.

“It is inappropriate for Russian tourists to walk around our cities and our ports. We have to send a signal to the Russian population that this war is not normal, it is unacceptable,” a senior EU official involved in the talks told the FT.

The EU representative added that even more important changes may be introduced by the end of the year: “We are in an exceptional situation that requires exceptional steps. We want to go beyond the suspension of visa facilitation.”

Read also:

• Russian tourists may be banned from entering Poland, Finland and the Baltic states if the EU does not adopt a bloc-wide ban
• Will the suspension of visas to Europe really affect Russians? A few examples and one thing that European leaders are missing
• The USA does not agree to the cancellation of visas for Russians, as requested by Ukraine
• Zelensky calls on the West to close its borders to Russians for a year: “Let them live in their own world”

___

• Follow the latest events of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HotNews.ro