Comment by wellthisisgreat
5 years ago
> Currently everyone who resists Putins will is arrested or worse. However that is simply not a scalable solution to keep an unhappy population from fighting back
It is not only scalable, moreover the regime is 100% prepared to scale it. The regime's prison/riot control machine will kill 10s of thousands and imprison 100s of thousands overnight if need be.
You clearly have no idea of what's going on there and what the response is like.
Russian people are unarmed (nobody owns weapons and they aren't readily available to anyone on some black market). The police/riot police/national guard are alienated from general population and will retaliate as if protestors are "enemy" (it was the case in every single instance, their never ever went easy on protestors).
The regime change can come either from the army (worst case scenario) or from the cabinet (best case scenario). A crushed civil uprising will just signal to the elites that they need not worry about the masses.
Thus calling for regular russian people to take up arms / topple the government is just pushing the whole thing to a senseless, pointless catastrophe. Painful, direct sanctions on elites AND all of their relatives/close employees (up to 3 degrees of separation), on the other hand..
I don't think we will agree with each other. I wrote a longer response, but it was just reiterating my previous points.
But I'll will leave with a rhetorical straw man argument.
Russia has a mandatory draft. These people did not choose to join the army, similar to how most people did not choose which country they live in. Is sending weapons that may kill these forced soldiers better or worse than providing economic pain to the entire population?
In both cases people who lack free will be affected.