Comment by jacktribe
5 years ago
> it is another thing entirely to celebrate businesses acting in ways to inflict the most suffering possible on the people least able to handle such abuse
No one is celebrating, I assure you. The crumbling economy, all of the restrictions, their children captured abroad, all these facts amount to a serious conversation amongst Russian people that can lead to a critical mass of people going into the streets and protesting. Look at December 1989 Romania, for a textbook example of people pushed too far with nothing to lose, taking matters in their own hands. It can happen again, but not so long as the Russian people don't feel the sting. It needs to be delivered fast and hard for people to trust that the great majority is with them.
Was Romania under any sanctions at the time?
People do overthrow lousy governments. I have yet to see proof that it happens as a consequence of sanctions.
Sanctions lead to people scrambling for survival, and those in power profiting further.
If sanctions are worthless, would you rather all the sanctioning countries militarily invade Russia and take out Putin and all the oligarchs? That was what used to happen when countries had wars with each other. Won't ordinary Russians suffer even more than having to move their domain names to a local provider?
Should belligerent countries be able to invade any country they want and suffer no consequences? You seem to be advocating for no consequences and having Ukrainians constantly die in a war just so the average Russian isn't inconvenienced
What is actually your alternative suggestion that you think will have real world and quick effects?
Sanctions vs invasion is a false dichotomy. It presumes that either of those things will cause better outcomes than not doing them, and that these are the only two things that could be done.
The burden is on supporters of war/sanctions to demonstrate that these measures can be reasonably expected to improve the situation. By itself, "well we can't just do nothing!" is not a good argument for taking a specific course of action.
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I am saying that sanctions on Russia will not affect any Ukranians dying or not. They will strictly make Russian "common people" suffer, and won't hurt their political elite either, and will likely make it stronger.
A way to remove any pre-text for wars like these is to allow secession by the UN, and to specifically allow regions (regardless of any existing drawn-up province/state borders) to split out in a democratic poll, with some costs involved (eg. repaying any investments in the region as if it was a loan, possibly land-resources tax based on percentage of GDP or something, but also some guarantees like no excessive tax on imports or visas for seceding regions).
Then there would be no Ukrainian claim on separatist-controlled regions in the East, and no Russian claim on the rest of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk that separatists control 1/3 of.
Basically, all the wars in Europe since the 90s were strictly led about territories with majority population of a region not being majority population of the country (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, now Ukraine). In the short term, it would have led to a bunch of "city-states", but like throughout history, they would re-unite and separate ad infinitum: as long as we can figure out a fair financial framework (that's less costly than war to all parties, otherwise, war will be resorted to anyway), there's nothing wrong about countries splitting up or reuniting.
Of course, just removing this pre-text for the war (he's "saving" Russians who live in Eastern Ukraine) might not have stopped Putin. But without knowing what "excuse" they'd come up with, I can't argue what the best course of action would have been.
The best course of action today is to recognize these realities, and work toward agreements that put this ("these parts of Ukraine are independent") into effect. That's going to be pretty hard to happen though.
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I notice there is a lot of they in your statement.
What about you ?