EU foreign ministers agree to suspend Russian tourist visa agreement

EU foreign ministers agreed at a summit in Prague on Wednesday to suspend an agreement that simplifies the visa application process for Russian tourists, the Czech News Agency reports. The issue of Russian tourist visas was one of the topics on the agenda for the second day of the informal two-day summit. While on Tuesday the heads of diplomacy mainly debated relations between the EU and Africa, on Wednesday the focus of the discussions was Ukraine.

The EU already previously suspended the part of the 2007 agreement that covered Russian government officials and businessmen, and is now turning its attention to the clause concerning tourists. If this were also to be suspended, it would mean that visa applications submitted by Russian citizens would no longer have priority processing, which in turn would mean that obtaining visas to the Schengen area would be bureaucratically more demanding and more expensive for Russian tourists and they would have to wait significantly longer for them to be processed. However, no official conclusions are adopted at informal meetings.

A complete EU-wide visa ban for Russian tourists proved too divisive, with some member states, including Czechia, for the proposal while others were against. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said that the European Commission and other institutions still have to find a way to solve the problem of the Baltic states, which need to limit the movement of hundreds of thousands of Russians across the border for security reasons.

EU foreign ministers also agreed at the meeting that EU countries will not recognize passports issued by Russian authorities in the occupied territories of Ukraine.