I agree sanctions shouldn’t target civilians. They should target things that support/enable military activity, and economic interests in a way that will make adventurism too expensive for decision makers. Yes this will inevitably hurt civilians. Not doing so hurts civilians in other countries the next time Russia invades. There is no way a shitload of civilians in either Russia or it’s neighbors don’t draw the short straw from here.
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I do not believe that it is possible to get out of their nationalist cult. There is nothing that can be done that isn’t easily countered by state media propaganda.
The Russian citizens could have known better. They knew that Soviet state media has been lying to them every day for ~75 years. Unlike the people in China or North Korea, they have real internet access to get independent information. They instead chose to continue to listen to Putin’s propaganda. That’s on them.
As converting the Russian citizens is unlikely at best the West’s approach should be guided by other goals: impede Russia’s ability to wage war instead of becoming complicit by financing it, undermine Russia’s global psyops campaign, make an example of them to deter future aggression from Russia or other countries.
I also think the comparison to the Treaty of Versailles isn’t appropriate. Germany lost 1/7 of its territory, was under occupation, had to pay impossible reparations etc. None of that is going to happen to Russia. While the war and atrocities are going on there should be no limit to the sanctions. If the collateral damage is that little Igor can’t download Minecraft from the Playstore, so be it. If there were to be bread lines, well, too bad.
I think this is the only part where we may disagree. “Bread lines” is kind of a vague term, but creating a humanitarian crisis in Russia just doesn’t make sense on any front other than “we want them to suffer”. Downloading Minecraft is one thing, actually starving Russian citizens is another. My objection isn’t to utilizing sanctions as a policy tool, my objection is to separating sanctions from policy goals just because it makes us feel good to hurt Russians. I am very skeptical that will end well for anyone.
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We shouldn’t be afraid of collateral damage when imposing sanctions on Russia. We shouldn’t target trying to minimize damage towards the average Russian citizen because Putin and the oligarchs are already going to shift things so that the common people bear the brunt of sanctions. We shouldn’t treat them like human shields that we are afraid to damage.
That’s fine. A clearer analogy to my position is we shouldn’t focus on the mowing down the human shields because want to hurt them with no greater plan to actually get to Putin and the oligarchs.
The goal shouldn’t be to create a humanitarian crisis. If the options are to not do specific sanctions that impede Russia’s war effort or do those sanctions and create a humanitarian crisis then I fully support those sanctions. Whatever this economic collateral damage is, it will be a fraction of what is imposed on innocent Ukrainians.
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No way to get to Putin and the oligarchs without mowing down the human shields in front of them, so we should just pick the most efficient way to mow down human shields.
yeah but 75yo dmitri watching propaganda channels is how putin is still in power. it’s not quite “no angels” or “little eichmann” and he is deeply oblivious to the damage his president is inflicting, but i am just truly sorry for him that the tv set has beaten the refrigerator finally.
ETA: that’s a common trope in russia. people are supposedly going to rise up and stop listening to the tv when the refrigerator stays empty for too long. well… it hasn’t happened yet.
that’s a prereq to even start talking about removing sanctions
forgive me, i’m going to lol at this.
russia doesn’t need any western help to create a humanitarian crisis in Russia. oh no, the west was so mean that putin decided to shoot everyone in the balls. voronezh looks like a bombed out rust belt town, and it’s not because of nato.
putin’s budget priorities is 1) army and enforcement. there is no 2), and it’s certainly not feeding the people. that means sanctions need to be strong enough to shrink russian budget by half, before it really starts to hurt the loyalist FSB. if that sounds like too much pain to inflict, perhaps we should just CLOSE THE SKY!
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Russia is one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, along with many other agricultural products. They have massive energy reserves. It has almost twice as much territory as the second largest country, but less than 2% of world population. Russia is more than capable of providing for the essentials and then some for its entire population. There are damn few sanctions the west can enact that would cause genuine suffering in the country.
so you are saying cutting off russia’s wheat is an economic opportunity for US and Canadian famrers?
We are impoverishing the Russian economy that directly pumps Putin’s war machine and that in turn will impoverish the Russian people. We know full well the Russian people will suffer from these sanctions.
That’s the price to pay to win a “cold” war with Russia.
It really rubs me the wrong way that Dimitri and Sergey get to live their lives as if nothing happened while Ukraine is turned into ash.
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It’d be nice if it were possible to arm Ukrainian nationalists so they could go on a suicide mission to blow up Russian energy infrastructure.
It takes a heck of a lot more than lots of wheat to be a self-sufficient economy in 2022.
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Potatoes?
Luckily they have an abundance of most everything else too. I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep about how sanctions hurt the citizens of a huge country with ample resources.