Ukraine handed the West a list of 500,000 Russian soldiers. Washington hasn’t read it

Ukraine has shared the identities of more than half a million Russian soldiers with its European partners. After almost a year, fewer than 1% of those names have been entered into the Schengen Information System, the database border guards across Europe check before letting travelers in, Euronews reported last week.Europe’s failure is at least a slow one. America has barely asked the question.That needs to change now. American, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators agreed to meet in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, this month. If President Donald Trump gets the ceasefire he is pushing for, Russia will start sending men home. Estonian officials estimate that around 1.5 million Russians have fought in Ukraine since 2022, including up to 180,000 recruited prisoners. By late 2025, the independent Russian outlet Verstka had documented more than 1,000 people killed or seriously injured inside Russia by soldiers back from the front. Estonia’s interior minister, Igor Taro, has warned that returning fighters “begin to seek new opportunities involving violence and organized crime.” Some of them will look west. Germany has blamed Moscow for an attempted drone attack on Leipzig airport in August. One suspect, according to Euronews, was a Belarusian who entered the European Union on a tourist visa issued by the Italian Consulate in Minsk.Europe’s front-line states are not waiting. Kyiv passes its data to Estonia, which shares it with Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Czechia. Estonia has barred more than 1,000 Russian combatants, and Lithuania moved in May to bar about 600 more. The holdouts are elsewhere. The EU’s July sanctions package made a ban on combatants conditional on rules still being drafted, after Italy and France pushed to soften it. The European Commission could present those rules to EU foreign ministers as early as Nov. 16, a week from now. EU states issued about 632,000 visas to Russians in 2025, and France, Italy, and Spain accounted for roughly three-quarters of them.Washington has no such list and no such debate. In fiscal 2024, the third year of the full-scale invasion and the last full year of the Biden administration’s visa policy, the United States issued 59,165 temporary visas to Russian citizens and 41,552 to Ukrainians. Since September 2025, Russians have had to travel to Warsaw or Astana for interviews. That is a logistical hurdle, not a security screen.The comparison gets stranger. In fiscal 2025, U.S. consulates refused 33.9% of Ukrainian tourist and business visa applicants and only 26.6% of Belarusians. Belarus is the dictatorship that let Russian troops invade Ukraine from its territory in 2022, and a Belarusian is a suspect in the Leipzig plot. To be fair, Russians were refused even more often, at 40.4%, and refusal rates measure the risk that a visitor will overstay, not loyalty. But that is the point. America’s visa system screens for people who might not go home. It does not screen for people who went to war.Washington has done this before. In May 2022, the State Department barred 2,596 members of the Russian military, in a move aimed partly at those accused of the Bucha massacre. That June, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) filed a bipartisan defense bill amendment with fellow Reps. Austin Scott (R-GA), Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), and Dan Goldman (D-NY). It would let the president deny visas to Russians who have fought in combat and to foreigners who fight for Russia, and revoke visas already issued. It never got a floor vote.Critics of an entry ban warn of collective punishment, lawsuits, and overloaded consulates, and they note that Russia can forge documents and invent identities. Those are arguments for careful design, not inaction. A visa is a privilege, not a right. And forged identities are a reason to use Ukraine’s data, not to ignore it.The fix starts with sequence. Ukraine should stop sending raw lists and send evidence packages for the most dangerous groups first: recruited convicts, officers, and units tied to documented abuses. Ukrainian journalists have already named the Russian commanders they hold responsible for the blockade and starvation of occupied Oleshky, the town where first lady Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire last month. Kyiv should hand the same files to Washington.OPINION: RUSSIA COUNTS ITS BEARS. IT DOESN’T COUNT ITS DEADThen America should act on three fronts: 1) Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department needs no new authority to check every Russian and Belarusian visa applicant in Warsaw and Astana against Ukraine’s data before a visa is issued, and it should; 2) Congress should give Wilson’s bipartisan idea the vote it never got, in the final defense bill or on its own, so the ban survives any peace deal; and 3) American diplomats should press Italy to stop blocking a European measure most of its partners already support before EU foreign ministers meet on Nov. 16.Russia’s soldiers will come home, and some will want to travel west. Ukraine has already told us who many of them are. The least we can do is read the list.Leonid Baratz is an investigative journalist based in Jerusalem and a Middle East correspondent for Ukrainian national television and radio. He writes on diplomacy and security for Israel’s BeSheva media group.