The European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, and the United States issued a joint statement yesterday announcing their common position in response to Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

One of the points they make is that they “commit to taking measures to limit the sale of citizenship—so called golden passports—that let wealthy Russians connected to the Russian government become citizens of our countries and gain access to our financial systems.”

This is most prominently a reversal for the UK whose passport was very much in demand by Russian oligarchs. The UK has now frozen the scheme altogether. Too little, too late, of course. But it’s more than Malta has done.

Given this statement, for as long as Malta continues to sell passports to Russian oligarchs we are no longer quite neutral in the new great war on Europe’s continent. We’re flatly siding with Putin against the West.

Robert Abela tried to sound vaguely human accusing the PN’s call for a freeze on passport sales to Russian as a declaration of collective hatred for all Russians. Is that how he is going to describe the joint statement that includes the European Commission, as an act of collective hatred to Russians? How out of touch can this man be?

His remarks on the PN’s position plant the seeds of prejudice with a lie. His is an act of disinformation that would frankly have made Vladimir Putin proud.

Ordinary Russians are not eligible to Malta’s passport scheme. That’s because they’re not millionaires who can afford to acquire Maltese passports. So no, calling for a freeze on the sale of passports to Russians is not a collective punishment imposed on ordinary Russians.

The freeze on passport sales to Russians is a sanction on Russia’s oligarchs, Vladimir Putin’s associates to the man. You can’t be a Russian millionaire, in Russia or outside it, without being in Vladimir Putin’s good books. The few who are not his friends, are his declared enemies, fugitives from Russia’s kangaroo court system and avoiding Russian agents who would not hesitate to use plutonium or novichok to kill them where they stand.

It is the retention of the scheme to provide shelter to Putin’s oligarchs that amounts to complicity with a war criminal and a prejudice against his victims, the people of his own country and of the country next door to him that he has chosen to invade.

Frankly the PN is less categorical than it should be and than it used to be before someone thought it was a bright idea to soften the stance against the sale of Malta’s citizenship. The passport scheme must be scrapped now. Altogether.

In the meantime, if we are as kind and considerate as we flatter ourselves into thinking we are, there are things we could do. We could abolish the 90-day limit on visa-free entry into Malta by Ukrainian citizens. That will require coordination with other Schengen countries but it’s something we can get busy with right away.

We could also introduce fast track processing of applications for political asylum for Russian political dissidents, protecting Putin’s critics and showing the Russian people that our beef is not with them but with the tyrant and his associates that have captured their country.

None of this is likely to happen of course. Robert Abela is only concerned with the serenity he enjoys in what he believes to be safe distance from the Ukrainian border. That callous attitude has a long-standing pedigree in the tradition of the Labour Party. Dom Mintoff’s “non-alignment”, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s fawning of Ghaddafi’s regime, Alfred Sant’s “Svizzera fil-Mediterran” are the antecedents of this culture of seeking profit from other people’s suffering.

In 2011, when the people of North Africa rose against the tyrants who had crushed their countries under iron fists for decades, Joseph Muscat, then still Leader of Opposition, urged the government to tune up its tourism advertising budget so that we could profit from weakening tourism in Tunisia and Egypt.

In comparison with selling European passports to Putin’s henchmen, diverting tourists from the Pyramids to Ħaġar Qim feels like social work. If Labour ran the country in 1938 we’d have given Rudolf Hess and Galeazzo Ciano the keys to Valletta.