Visa-free travel carrot
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EU leaders are expected to give Russia a political promise of visa-free travel at an upcoming summit in the town of Rostov-on-Don.
"Some member states are in favour of a faster liberalisation of visa requirements with regard to Russia," Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said after an EU meeting in Brussels earlier this month.
However, there is no talk of a concrete date for the introduction of the scheme. Russia is intent on moving towards visa-free travel with the European Union and scrapping the restrictions, which it regards as anachronistic.
But some EU capitals are worried that without re-admission agreements between Moscow and the EU, the bloc could be flooded by migrants from Central Asia.
Lifting visas for Russia and other post-Soviet countries would not be a shock for Poland, which had no local visa barriers until 2003, when it changed its rules to meet EU accession criteria.
A report by the Warsaw-based Batory Foundation suggests that as Eastern Europe joined the EU, its relationships with neighbours like Ukraine and Belarus deteriorated.
Some say EU visas are a political and security issue in post-Soviet Europe.
In the run-up to the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, Moscow handed out Russian passports to people in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, enabling them to pay less to enter the EU than on Georgian passports.
Moscow's critics say the move undermined Georgia's territorial integrity and gave Russia a pretext to invade South Ossetia to protect what Moscow called Russian citizens.
