Moldova’s Success Story: Visa-free Regime with the EU One Year on

On the eve of the Eastern Partnership Summit in Riga, the experts from Stefan Batory Foundation (Warsaw) and Instutute of World Policy (Kyiv) published a policy paper ‘Moldova’s success story: the visa-free regime with the EU one year on’.

Visa liberalisation is one of the largest successes of the Eastern Partnership so far and it has been a year since Moldovan citizens with biometric passports can travel to the European Union visa-free. Although the liberalisation process raised concerns of irregular migration or significant inflow of asylum seekers, nothing of it happened and all available data show, that the visa-free regime functions smoothly.

The policy paper suggest that the success of Moldova is a significant argument in favour of visa liberalisation with other Eastern Partnership countries, first of all Georgia and Ukraine. However, the example of Moldova shows that Ukraine’s and Georgia’s main challenges on the way to visa liberalisation is the existence of separatist regions.

Policy Paper ‘Moldova’s success story: the visa-free regime with the EU one year on’