Over four years the list of countries that let you in on an «investment» passport has been shrinking — and it is still shrinking right now. Below: what exactly has closed, under which documents and from which date; what the passport gives you regardless of any visa-free list; and three questions worth asking before you pick a programme by the number of countries in the brochure.
1. First, let us agree
One of our clients put it like this:
We are not going to argue with all of that, because half of it is true. Selling a passport on the number of visa-free countries is a bad idea for one reason: that number is not in our control, and not in yours. It is changed by an official’s decision in Brussels, London or Dublin — and over the past four years it has been changed many times.
So what follows is not a list of countries but a map: where visa-free access is genuinely narrowing, where it has held, and what the passport does regardless of what the next committee decides.
2. What exactly has closed: a timeline by document
Vanuatu
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| March 2022 | The EU partially suspended the visa-free agreement |
| 4 February 2023 | Full suspension of the agreement (Council of the EU decision of 08.11.2022) |
| 19 July 2023 | The UK introduced a visa for Vanuatu citizens (Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules, HCWS979) |
| 7 March 2024 | Ireland introduced a visa, including airport transit |
| 12 December 2024 | The Council of the EU removed Vanuatu from the visa-free list for good |
The December 2024 decision deserves a separate mention: it was the first time the EU withdrew visa-free access from a country specifically because of its citizenship-by-investment programme, rather than because of migration statistics.
Dominica
19 July 2023 — a UK visa (under the same instrument as Vanuatu). 7 March 2024 — an Irish visa, including transit.
Saint Lucia
5 March 2026 — the UK removed Saint Lucia from the list of countries whose citizens travel on an ETA: a full visitor visa is now required, and a transit visa for changing planes at a UK airport. 15 June 2026 — an Irish visa.
Saint Kitts and Nevis
15 June 2026 — an Irish visa (announced on 11 June by Ireland’s Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration). At the same time, Saint Kitts citizens still enter the UK on an ETA, and their visa-free Schengen access remains. Here Ireland went further than London and Brussels.
All five Caribbean programmes at once
On 30 December 2025 the revised EU visa suspension mechanism entered into force (Regulation (EU) 2025/2441, adopted 26 November 2025). The key change: the operation of a citizenship-by-investment scheme became a standalone ground for suspending visa-free access — the regulation defines it as a scheme under which citizenship is granted in exchange for pre-determined payments or investments, without any genuine link to the country. Previously it had to be shown that a programme was poorly administered or that a specific undesirable individual had passed through it. Now it does not.
In the eighth report under this mechanism, of 19 December 2025, the European Commission named five countries outright: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia.
On 25 June 2026, according to a statement by the Office of the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, all five governments received letters from the European Commission asking them to wind the programmes down by 1 June 2028, with a 24-month transition period. The interim measures Brussels expects sooner: full exclusion of persons under EU restrictive measures, and enhanced vetting of applicants of all nationalities — by September 2026 at the latest. The Caribbean response will be taken into account in the next report, scheduled for December 2026.
What matters about the status of this story today: not one programme is closed, no one’s visa-free access is suspended, issued passports are valid and filed applications are being processed. The Commission has not published the letter itself — it is known from the Antigua government’s statement. We write about this not to frighten anyone, but because the planning horizon for someone choosing a programme right now is exactly three to four years.
What is actually open on a Russian or Belarusian passport is set out separately in the honest map of programmes for RF/RB citizens.
3. What these passports do not give — said plainly
- Visa-free Schengen. Neither a Turkish passport, nor a Vanuatu passport, nor a São Tomé and Príncipe passport gives visa-free entry to the Schengen area. If your task is phrased as «I want Europe without a visa», none of the programmes available today to a Russian or Belarusian citizen solves it. We say this at the first meeting, before any contract, and we would rather lose the deal here than a year from now.
- The right to live and work in the EU or the US. Citizenship of a third country is a different set of visas, not a right of residence in Europe or America.
- A change of tax residency. A passport by itself does not move you out from under the rules of your current jurisdiction. What operates is the 183-day rule, the centre-of-vital-interests test, double tax treaties, CFC rules and CRS automatic exchange. A second citizenship and a residence permit must be reported to the Russian tax and interior authorities within the statutory deadlines — the procedure is in the guide to notifying the tax office and the interior ministry. We are not tax advisers — check the specific structure with yours.
- Exemption from source-of-funds checks. A second passport changes the «citizenship» line on a form. It does not remove questions about where the money came from, nor enhanced due diligence: that is applied on a combination of factors, not on a single line.
4. What works regardless of any visa-free list
This is the answer to «it does not really work anywhere». Below is what no committee decision cancels.
- The right to enter and stay in your own country. Citizenship is a status, not a visa. It is not withdrawn over politics and not «suspended» for a year. Under most programmes the only ground for revocation is fraud in obtaining it — and that is a separate conversation about how the file was assembled.
- A different queue when you apply for a visa. You file as a citizen of country X, under the rules that apply to that country: a different document list, different timelines, a different refusal history. This is not a guarantee of a visa — a visa is issued by a consulate and by no one else. But your entry conditions are different.
- Identification at financial institutions. Clients put this task as: «accounts and a broker — not on my Russian passport». We name no banks and no routes, and nobody honest will name them in advance: the decision is made by the compliance function of the specific institution. What genuinely changes is the set of documents you arrive with. We covered how this works in the piece on a second passport, residency and foreign banks.
- The status is inherited. Children acquire citizenship by birth or are included in the application. For a family thinking about schooling and about which document their child will travel on in ten years, this is often the main point.
- A way out of «my only document is expiring». A separate and underrated scenario: a person abroad whose passport is running out and who cannot easily renew it, or cannot renew it at all. Here the second document solves not a travel problem but the problem of existing within a legal system. A status that does not require moving is covered separately in Plan B without emigrating.
5. Three questions instead of counting countries
- Where do you actually travel? Not «how many countries», but which five to seven destinations. The list in the brochure almost always includes places you will never go to, and almost never answers the question about the one specific country you need.
- What will you do if that destination closes? As section 2 shows, they do close. The question is not whether it will happen, but whether your plan falls apart on one such decision. If the whole point of the purchase is a single destination, the plan is fragile.
- What do you need the passport for besides travel? If there is an answer — bank identification, status for the children, replacing an expiring document, access to a specific visa category such as the US E-2 — then the narrowing of visa-free lists affects you far less than it seems. If there is no answer, it is worth honestly working out whether solving the travel task with visas comes out cheaper.
6. What this changes in how we work
We do not sell the «how many countries» number. We go through your specific route and tell you where the passport will work and where it will not — before the money, not after. If the task is solved more cheaply with visas, we will say that too. How long each route realistically takes is set out in the piece on honest timelines; the two programmes available on a Russian or Belarusian passport are broken down in Vanuatu and São Tomé and Príncipe.