Flying and Russian citizenship (Ukraine war related sanctions)

Hmmm. Human rights in Ukraine, with civilians absolutely deliberately targeted, is not a human rights issue?

Are we actually disagreeing?

We all (I think) see sanctions against oligarchs / members of the Duma as being justified.
Mooney-driver makes the point that it’s a human rights issue when sanctions impact on Russian expatriates who have no responsibility for the war.
I make the point that the sanctions seem to be designed to try and avoid that.

The text seems to vary per country.

I am not saying targeting all Russians is fair; only that doing it more individually is very difficult to do. And in many/most cases, connections to the regime cannot be established.

I think in the circumstances neither western governments nor western citizens are particularly interested in the effects of all this on ordinary Russians.

May sound harsh, but hardly surprising.

Peter wrote:

And in many/most cases, connections to the regime cannot be established.

I suspect that there aren’t many honest oligarchs – is Russia the sort of place that favours honest businessmen? I think that those with the closest ties to Putin are well known, though I agree that pinning anything on them might be harder to do.

There may not be an upswelling of sympathy for everyday Russians living in the UK / EU, but that’s no reason for officials (or anybody else) to treat them badly. Legally, is it more defensible to discriminate against all Russians than it is to discriminate against those you suspect of having ties to Putin’s regime?

I believe there are some legal tools such as forcing people to disclose the origin of large sums of money under pain of confiscation, that would terrify an oligarch but make my former Russian neighbour laugh (finding the money for a deposit on a new house was a real struggle).

@Graham, this would certainly be viewed as harsh (and likely illegal) by most people in the US. A similar restriction was in place for about a week in the US (March 2 – March 11) before the FAA “clarified” that only people specified on some list are affected. Of course the bureaucrats (and their boss) are idiots but I imagine some congressmen or a senator made a very justified fuss and it was quickly fixed. The US legal view, particularly in relation to naturalized US citizens tends to be that you forget your former country, you don’t negotiate with them for release. People come here to escape tyranny.

Historically there is lots of precedent in both countries. There were camps for Japanese in the US in WW2 and for Germans in the UK. Down the road from me is a plaque to a German academic who was hounded out of the town during WW1.

mayday_allday wrote:

I will do it of course, but it means I am grounded for at least a year. I am currently considering other ways around – sue the German Ministry of transport, or appeal to the German commissioner for human rights, or go to the press…

You can contact Europe Direct on how the Council Regulation (EU) 2022/334 amending Council Regulation (EU) 833/2014 is to be applied in your case.

One might be persuaded to crowdfund a little if such action proved prohibitively expensive.

@Silvaire, sure – it works in the US because they are a long way from their former countries and don’t need to leave the US again.

Putin has demonstrated that ‘ex-Russians’ in Europe, particularly in the UK, are not beyond his reach. It is also my instinct that one would just say “f*ck ’em” as regards the former country and not negotiate release from citizenship, but it may not be practical in Europe.

The UK government should have regarded the attacks on Litvinenko and Skripal as acts of war, in my view. It showed enormous weakness to take no real action.

Unfortunately Putin is not going to change course. The only option remaining is to drive Russia into the stone age, economically. Johnson said some stupid things today equating Brexit with the Ukrainian struggle, but he also said something about never again normalising relations with Putin, no matter what. First western leader to touch that issue, I believe.

Is a Russian passport necessary for travelling to Russia?

I am not talking about somebody who is a high profile activist and is thus well known to the Russian govt.

South Africans are in theory in the same position, and there will be many other countries which take the view that if you hold, or have ever held, or are entitled to applying for one, of theirs, then you must travel on it. In reality, RSA does not (empirically, currently) enforce this 100% strictly, but you never quite know because their current govt is pretty crazy (they are backing Putin, so go figure ).

Personally I would get try to rid of such a passport. Russia is IMHO never going to recover from this, economically or in reputation.

On the wider aspect of EuroGA, has everybody stopped flying? I know the “Russia topic” has been banned on seemingly all other GA forums, but there is only so many times one can go round and round, on this and the other (again locked) thread.