An animated reel is making the rounds across Russian Instagram circles. Set to the contemplative music from the space epic “Interstellar,” it shows a Russian cosmonaut traveling back in time to see prewar Russia — and himself. The reel highlights what Russia lost to the war: Uniqlo stores, Ikea’s Swedish meatballs, discounted Nike sneakers, direct flights to Europe, Starbucks (pumpkin spice and all) and Coca-Cola bottles once printed with Russian names: Sergei, Masha, Andrei. The voice-over, clearly imitating the character played by Matthew McConaughey in the Hollywood film, tries to send a message to his past self: “You think you can put something off for later. But you’re so wrong.” There’s not a word in the video about why these brands, and the lifestyle they can provide, are no longer available in Russia. It simply ends with the protagonist sobbing, just as McConaughey did in the film.
He is not mourning lives lost or atrocities committed in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the interruption of a convenient, upper-middle-class existence — one that involves largely unfettered access to Europe, even if it means getting there without a direct flight. The short video, part of “Vitya i Oleg,” a series made by Russian animators known as Homies, gets to the heart of Russian middle-class sentiment: Why are those not participating in the war punished for the actions of their authoritarian government?
In late November, Russians were dealt one of their harshest collective punishments yet, when the European Union decided to ban multiple-entry visas for Russian citizens to the Schengen zone, which includes 29 European countries with a common visa policy. The move caused uproar, angering Russians who are against the war as well as those who support it. The sense that the EU’s decision was unfair became, arguably, the first common ground between Russians who left and those who stayed behind.
The EU said the tightened rules were a security measure, made in response to Russian drone incursions into European airspace and sabotage attacks linked to Russia. Across Europe, officials are raising the alarm over Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics. This week, U.K. spy chief Blaise Metreweli used her inaugural speech to warn that the “export of chaos is a feature, not a bug, in the Russian approach to international engagement.”
The EU’s restrictions are arguably the harshest, especially when compared with the measures taken by other Western countries against not just oligarchs and politicians but also so-called ordinary Russians. Schengen visas, which allow border-free travel through most of Europe, were already difficult for Russians to obtain, and countries such as Poland and Finland have since barred entry to Russian nationals without residence permits. Meanwhile, many Russian exiles have seen their European bank accounts closed or frozen in recent months.
Yet the impact reaches far beyond exiles. Demand from Russian tourists for European travel rose by up to 50% compared to the previous year, according to the Russian Union of Travel Industry. Experts predict more than 700,000 Schengen visa applications from Russia this year, up by about 20% from 2024. Popular destinations include Italy, France and Spain, where tourists flock for luxury shopping, restaurants and resorts.
“[Vladimir] Putin is not Russia, and Russian citizens are not the ones responsible for this war,” Yulia Navalnaya, leader of the Russian opposition, wrote in an open letter to EU diplomat Kaja Kallas. She warned that a visa ban plays into Kremlin propaganda, which portrays Europe as hostile to Russia, further isolating Russian society.
The Ukrainians facing bombs, shootings and kidnappings by Russian forces might disagree. Yet the Russian opposition has consistently sought to distinguish “ordinary Russians” from the Kremlin, even if public opinion polls show limited anti-war sentiment.
While there’s no denying that Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe, the idea that canceling multiple-entry visas will stop the state from wreaking havoc is questionable at best. “First, in the modern world — whether we like it or not — it’s not that difficult to obtain a third-country passport, for example through investment,” says Tikhon Dzyadko, editor-in-chief of the independent channel TV Rain, now based in Amsterdam. “Second,” he adds, “we’ve repeatedly seen Russia use, for hostile operations in Europe, citizens of, for example, Ukraine or Belarus.”
That reality has already played out. After hundreds of Russian intelligence officers were expelled from European embassies, Moscow adapted by recruiting expendable passport holders. In October, a British court sentenced two men, Dylan Earl and Jake Reeves, under the U.K.’s new National Security Act for carrying out arson and sabotage operations on behalf of the Wagner Group. They were targeting sites that included a London warehouse storing humanitarian aid and Starlink equipment bound for Ukraine. This Russia-backed operation required neither single nor multiple-entry visas to Europe or the U.K.
Some in Moscow argued the EU measures would never touch people with real government connections — most Russians traveling to Europe are neither war criminals nor agents of the FSB, Russia’s domestic security agency. Their anger stems from feeling punished twice: first by Putin at home, and now by the EU for a war they had no power to stop.
Some Russians closely tied to the Kremlin maintain privileged lives in Europe. Ksenia Sobchak, a media figure and former presidential candidate, recently applied for a Spanish residence permit. Anastasiia Tokareva, the daughter of Maj. Gen. Alexander Tokarev, posts reels from Naples and Rome, while her father back home is shown delivering a briefing before Putin. Putin’s alleged daughter, the 22-year-old Elizaveta Krivonogikh, lives in Paris, where she works as a DJ.
Earlier this month, Krivonogikh was confronted by a Ukrainian journalist who asked how she felt about her father killing his brother. She replied that she hadn’t consented to be filmed and, when asked whether she could ask her father to stop killing Ukrainians, said something along the lines of, “Yeah, sure, that’s how it works,” before begrudgingly apologizing. Krivonogikh is, of course, a specific case, more a matter of French-Russian relations than any EU-wide policy. Such examples fuel perceptions of European hypocrisy, but they represent a small fraction of Russians visiting Europe.
For the most part, the Russian urban middle class doesn’t participate in the war, which remains largely outsourced to Russia’s poorest regions. Of the more than 155,000 Russian military deaths tallied by the BBC and independent Russian news outlet Mediazona, the overwhelming majority come from economically marginalized areas and republics whose residents are not ethnically Russian. Moscow and St. Petersburg were barely touched by the 2022 mobilization. A Kremlin-backed campaign called “Bez Paniki” (“Don’t Panic”) depicted hip, urban men playing video games, drinking lattes and staying home. Enlistment bonuses — sometimes exceeding $60,000 — targeted men with few alternatives.
This desire to preserve a sense of consumerist normalcy has defined the Russian middle class since 2022. They seek a world without drones overhead and without news of Ukrainian deaths. In this effort, the Kremlin is an ally: Restaurants, boutiques, festivals and performances continue; French wine and iPhones remain available despite sanctions; travel abroad persists, albeit with more flight connections. Yet some losses, like major international brands, pierce through the wall of wealth and comfort.
Among the Russians flocking to Europe, there are people opposed to Putin and the war in Ukraine. “It seems to me that more extensive screening is sufficient — checking social media, conducting interviews and so on — but not cutting people off purely on the basis of the passport they hold,” says Dzyadko, adding that no screening will keep all Putin supporters and pro-war Russians from going on shopping trips to Galeries Lafayette in Paris. “But at least the baby won’t be thrown out with the bath water — in this case, dissidents and Russians who do not support the war.” Should a Russian dissident want to get a humanitarian visa, or simply visit Europe, they can still do that, however. And dissidents don’t form the majority of those Russians going to Spain, Italy or France.
“The question of whether the Russian middle class that is not physically fighting in Ukraine is ‘culpable’ is often framed too narrowly, as if responsibility only begins with holding a weapon,” says Dmytro Iarovyi, Associate Professor in political communication at the Kyiv School of Economics, adding that from a political perspective, modern wars, especially those of aggression, “are sustained not only by soldiers, but by societies.”
The Russian upper-middle class undeniably benefits from the war, first, simply by making money in the war economy of a country that started the biggest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. That economy is, for the most part, intricately linked to the state: For instance, someone working at Russian information technology giant Yandex doesn’t weld cannons, but they work in a company that routinely censors news about Russian atrocities in Ukraine and is part of an emerging media conglomerate run by Kremlin appointees. Second, the Russian upper-middle class pays taxes in a country where the war takes upward of one-third of the state budget.
“Noticeable segments of the urban middle class benefit from the regime’s stability, consume state narratives, avoid political risk and normalize the war as background noise,” adds Iarovyi. “This is not passive neutrality; it is a form of structural participation.”
These aren’t crimes in themselves, but a ban on multiple-entry visas to Europe isn’t exactly a sentence from the International Criminal Court, either. It doesn’t curtail people’s rights — just their purchasing power. But in Russia, a country where, in the first days of the war, Ikea saw unprecedented lines of people sweeping up everything around them, this reads as punishment.
The “Interstellar” reel isn’t ironic. It is a small artifact of an era’s misbegotten morality. The cosmonaut does not travel back in time to warn himself about what his country is about to do, or what his own taxes and silence are going to underwrite. He returns to mourn the loss of things he could buy. And that’s precisely what makes the clip so honest. It shows a class that has repeatedly measured its relationship to the Russian invasion of Ukraine not by the destruction of lives, but by the interruption of their upper-middle-class existence. And when one considers the way that Ukrainian lives were affected by the war, it’s hard to see Russians as the ones being punished. Rather, they’re being limited in their ability to spend money on things they enjoy. It’s true, most of the Russians applying for Schengen visas aren’t directly responsible for the war. But they are responsible for doing everything in their power to ignore it. And now that has become harder to do.
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