Comment by int_19h
5 years ago
I reiterate: there's not a single example of that working in the history of sanctions against authoritarian regimes, ever.
The reason why there isn't one is because whatever sanctions you can come up with, they cannot make life harder than said authoritarian regime for people inside the country if they tried to "stand up". You might be eating less because of sanctions, but standing up means you'll be eating even less in prison - assuming you live to see it.
A problem with authoritarian regimes is that their people can't opt out of violence. Instead, in this instance, it's other nation's citizens made to pay while Russians suffer relatively minor financial crises for the acts of a government they are usually supportive of. If it's hard to stand up now, it would have been easier before they allowed the extension of term limits or assassinations in other countries. Every Western democracy owes itself to someone, at the least indirectly to French revolutionaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%932013_Russian_prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebell...
And which of these involved sanctions?
Note that the 1905 revolution in particular happened because of a lost war. So it reiterates my main point: the goal should be to defeat Russia militarily in Ukraine, because that's the only thing that will save the latter.