Comment by ralferoo

> A person is not responsible for the actions of their government. All governments wage war and cause suffering.

That is true, but one of the reasons for imposing sanctions after diplomatic processes fail to get the government change their course of action, beyond just causing economic harm to the government, is specifically to apply pressure on population such that they don't want to support their government any more and vote them out, or where that isn't possible cause an insurrection.

Whether it is right for another country to influence another country in that way is debatable, but as sanctions are only effective if basically every other country adheres to them, by that point it's clear that every other country disagrees with the target country under sanctions (or values their relationship with the countries that do more than the target), so perhaps it's not unreasonable.

In any case, it's clear that partly from the Russian government restricting the flow of information inside Russia, but also from opinions that the population already had, there's still a lot of support within Russia for continuing the war. Perhaps, sanctions will help influence popular opinion against the war, perhaps not, but that is one of the main goals of sanctions. Just saying "oh, but they're just ordinary citizens, they're not responsible for government actions" misses the point of what sanctions are trying to achieve.