The EU’s efforts to keep Russian war veterans out of Europe are facing major legal and administrative obstacles, despite Ukraine having provided European authorities with the identities of more than 500,000 Russian soldiers. After almost a year of work, fewer than 1% of those names have been entered into the Schengen Information System (SIS), the shared database used by European countries to identify people who may be refused entry.
The slow progress has raised concerns among European governments about whether existing border security rules are adequate to deal with the risks posed by Russian military personnel returning from the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been compiling information about Russian soldiers identified on the frontline and sharing the records with Estonia. The Estonian authorities then pass the information to other European countries, including Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Czechia.
Officials in these countries have spent recent months reviewing the information and entering individual names into the Schengen Information System. The database is used by border authorities to identify people subject to entry restrictions, while police and other law enforcement agencies can also access it for security purposes.
SIS was originally established to support security cooperation after internal border controls were removed across the Schengen area. Over time, its role has expanded to include a wider range of alerts relating to migration, border management and law enforcement.
However, the system was not designed to accommodate large databases of foreign military personnel who have never travelled to Europe. European law requires authorities to establish specific legal grounds for each alert and assess the individual threat posed by the person concerned.
This requirement has made it difficult for EU countries to process Ukraine’s information on a large scale. The fact that someone served in the Russian military or fought in Ukraine does not automatically qualify them for an entry ban under existing Schengen rules.
Under EU regulations governing alerts for refusal of entry and stay, national authorities must determine whether an individual’s presence would pose a threat to public policy, public security or national security.
Consequently, governments cannot simply transfer Ukraine’s entire database into the European security system. Each case requires additional information, an individual assessment and a formal decision before an alert can be issued.
The process is particularly demanding given the number of names involved. Some of the Russian soldiers identified by Ukraine may also have died during the war, making the verification process more complicated.
Despite these limitations, European officials see the Schengen Information System as the most effective tool currently available.
“At this stage, we have nothing better to do than put these people in the SIS; it’s the most effective system,” an EU diplomat told Euronews. The diplomat explained that an alert entered by one member state is shared across the system and applies to all participating countries.
European authorities have encountered similar difficulties before when dealing with former Islamic State fighters. However, that group involved only a few hundred individuals, a considerably smaller number than the hundreds of thousands of Russian military personnel now under consideration.
The question of restricting Russian combatants from entering the EU has also featured in negotiations over sanctions against Moscow. The issue became a point of disagreement during discussions on the bloc’s latest sanctions package, adopted in July 2026.
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France and Italy pushed for changes to the proposed restrictions, resulting in a compromise that did not introduce an immediate, direct ban on Russian combatants. Instead, the measure was made conditional on further implementation steps.
The European Commission is now working on those arrangements and could present proposals at the next Foreign Affairs Council meeting on 16 November.
The discussions are taking place against a wider deterioration in European security concerns about Russia. Governments have increasingly raised the possibility that Moscow’s activities extend beyond conventional military operations in Ukraine, including suspected sabotage, drone incidents and other forms of hybrid activity.
One incident that attracted particular attention was an attempted drone attack at Leipzig Airport in August. German authorities formally attributed the incident to Russia in September, according to Euronews.
The changing security situation has also exposed differences among EU member states over how strictly Russian citizens should be allowed to enter Europe.
Northern and eastern European countries have been pushing for tighter restrictions on tourist visas for Russians. Other member states, including France, Italy and Spain, continue to issue Russian tourist visas in significant numbers.
At an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in early September, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said there was “broad support” for moving forward with restrictions on tourist visas for Russian soldiers and war veterans.
A second EU diplomat told Euronews that governments needed to respond firmly to security incidents attributed to Russia to discourage further attacks. The diplomat also suggested that France had moved towards supporting stronger restrictions, while Italy remained the main source of resistance.
Italy’s concerns are partly practical. Its consular services could face considerable pressure if they were required to identify former Russian military personnel among thousands of visa applicants. The government is also concerned about possible legal challenges if restrictions are introduced without sufficiently strong legal grounds.
The issue has become more complicated following the Leipzig airport incident. One of the main suspects was a Belarusian citizen who had entered the EU using a tourist visa issued by the Italian consulate in Minsk. The other suspect was a Russian-born Latvian citizen.
For European governments, the case illustrates the difficulties of assessing security risks through existing visa procedures, particularly when applicants may have different nationalities or travel documents.
The European Commission and member states are therefore examining several ways to strengthen the system without creating measures that could be challenged successfully in court.
Initial discussions included consultations between the EU delegation in Moscow and member states’ consulates about the practical difficulties of identifying Russian former combatants. However, officials believe that consular procedures are not the main obstacle and that operational arrangements could be introduced relatively quickly.
A Commission document circulated during the latest sanctions negotiations, seen by Euronews, proposed requiring Russian men of conscription age applying for EU visas to submit additional supporting documents, including military identification booklets.
Such a requirement could help authorities establish whether an applicant has served in the Russian armed forces. However, officials are concerned that the system could be circumvented through forged military documents or false identities supplied by Russian authorities.
Some EU countries have already introduced stricter requirements. Czechia, for example, allows Russian nationals to enter only if they hold biometric passports.
An EU official familiar with the discussions told Euronews that the priority was not simply to introduce restrictions but to ensure they could not easily be avoided.
One longer-term option under consideration is an amendment to the Schengen Borders Code. This could give member states greater flexibility in using the Schengen Information System and potentially create a new category of alerts for individuals considered security threats.
The EU is also looking at changes to its Visa Code. The European Commission is expected to propose a revision in early 2027, which could give the bloc greater authority to coordinate visa restrictions against specific categories of travellers, including combatants from countries engaged in aggression against another state.
The discussions extend beyond former Russian soldiers. European governments are also considering further restrictions on the movements of Russian diplomats and consular staff, whose activities have increasingly attracted scrutiny amid concerns about hybrid threats.
The EU’s 19th sanctions package introduced a requirement for Russian diplomats to notify authorities in another member state before travelling to or transiting through that country. However, a separate provision allowing governments to require advance authorisation has seen little practical use.
The wider challenge for the EU is to develop a common approach that can be enforced across member states without violating existing legal protections. Ukraine has supplied a substantial amount of information about Russian military personnel, but turning that information into enforceable European entry restrictions has proved far more complicated than expected.
For now, the gap between the number of names provided by Kyiv and those entered into the Schengen security system remains a measure of how difficult it is for European governments to translate growing security concerns into workable border policies.
