Sanctions will not work this way, period.
It is obvious if you think about it for a while.
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Sanctions have been the main official justification for Putin’s prolonged rule and his mistakes. They were the fuel and the proofs for his “The World Is Against Us” rhetorics. Now they enabled him to introduce some interesting laws, like 15 years of corrective labor colony for “spreading fakes about the special operation of liberating Ukraine from the Nazis”
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People whose well-being has been affected by the war will not protest. It is always better to be poor than to serve 15 years of corrective labor colony. Period. And just in case, life in Russia is still much better than life in Ukraine, at least because war is on the Ukrainian territory.
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There still were and probably will be people who protest and protested, not because of the money interests you’ve described but because of their genuine repulsion towards the war, especially this war. Well, many of them got or will get their punishments. Also, they’ll be a good picture for a TV report on a Russian channel called “The Enemy is brainwashing our nation, this is exactly why we must focus on searching for traitors and disposing of them.” That’s how it all will end.
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Nobody will start an armed protest on the same reason why there’ve been almost no slightly armed protests in Russia for the recent decades. In 1917 a revolution led to the establishment of a totalitarian state, nobody wants that to repeat.
This is the reason why those sanctions aren’t capable of giving a start to a revolution. If they do provoke something inside the target country, that’s the unrest towards those stupid Westerners who interfere in things they don’t understand.
Sanctions might have an effect, though. If they manage to completely destabilise the Russian economy. But the costs for the whole world might be huge. In any case, that’s to be left for another speculation
And for god’s sake, I’m not saying that sanctions should not be taken. Apart from sending weapons, sanctions are the only way the West can help Ukraine without actually deploying their troops. That’s the reason for the sanctions, I suppose.
Wait just one minute.
According to everything I’ve seen here, you’re not even supposed to pose a question like that. You’re not supposed to ask “Are sanctions good or bad?” because you’re not the ones responsible for imposing them in the first place and, let’s be sincere, nobody here can make an actual, significant effect on the course of that war.
No, instead of that you’re supposed to ask “Why exactly are the Western nations imposing those sanctions?” You can express moral judgement only AFTER you understand what’s going on, or else your words will be an emotion-driven description of stuff going on in your head. And how can any of you be sure that your current picture of the war isn’t biased or oversimplified?
And if you analyze the article with cold blood, you can immediately see that it doesn’t give any explanation for the West’s actions, apart from the fact that They Are Evil. Bad West!