Officials say most applicants are Russian citizens who are after a travel document. Yerevan attorney Nerses Isajanyan expects a residence permit requirement.
Banks read a brief amendment as a freeze. Decree 550 exempts foreign individuals and lets them recover rubles already moved.
Listed Russians can’t renew their passport. They also can’t renounce it.
More than three decades after the Soviet flag came down, its heirs diverged: EU passports in the Baltics, easy residency in the Caucasus, new golden visas in Central Asia, and Moscow’s own offer.
The Russian Golden Visa now has zero physical residency requirement as the government unobtrusively amends the law.
Germans lead SVV applications with 224 submissions, reflecting the broader dominance of European countries in the applicant pool.
The Quadrilateral Agreement allows pre-1991 Soviet-born applicants to get Kyrgyz citizenship without ever having lived in the country
Rough start for Russia’s golden visa: Numbers tumble from 24 to 14 investors year-on-year. 2025 opens with only two applications.
From Russia’s “anti-woke” visa and El Salvador’s “free passports” to Caribbean CBI revocations, these were IMI’s most-read stories in 2024.
Russia’s new Shared Values Visa targets 47 nations. Ilja Belobragin sees it as a workforce strategy, doesn’t expect list to expand soon.
“Moscow is objectively the best megapolis to live in today from a quality of life, security, and safety perspective,” says Ilja Belobragin.
The visa is exempt from the quota restriction, and Anastasia Barna and Ilja Belobragin say that there is already high demand for it.
“With a PR and assets in Russia, many Chinese, for example, may feel safer than they would in Europe or North America,” said Philippe May.
Russians and Belarusians are excluded again. The suspension, moreover, will have retroactive effect, going back three weeks.
Analysts expect “primarily Chinese” investors to take advantage of the program to occupy niches vacated by recently departed Western firms.
Ukrainians – in a grimly ironic twist – remain excluded from the program because of the very belligerence to which they have fallen prey.
Dr. Andrés Solimano, who holds a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, identifies six global effects of the war and the impact they could have on IM.
Nuri Katz says recent weeks’ events show that “unless something changes drastically, we are closer to the end of the CBI industry than to the beginning of it.”
The golden visas of Ireland and Spain join the fast-growing list of investment migration programs closing its doors to Russians.
Two weeks after Dominica’s CIP became the first in the Caribbean to suspend Russians and Belarusians, Saint Lucia becomes the 5th and final.
