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by fnovd 1116 days ago
OK, so your ministers are targeted, but everyday citizens are not. It's now trivial to work around sanctions and they don't matter at all. When your sanctions are symbolic, that's fine. When they're meant to actually have an economic impact, that doesn't work. There's an argument for fomenting dissent against the government causing the sanctions, too. If there were good, easy solutions, it wouldn't be the conflict that it is.
1 comments
hutzlibu 1116 days ago
"It's now trivial to work around sanctions and they don't matter at all."

Putin did not dare to travel to south africa. The Oligarchs cannot use their Yachts anymore and their international assets are frozen(and they are not happy about it). That sounds like pretty effective targeted sanctions to me.

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the_only_law 1116 days ago
I thought the point of sanctions was to discourage whatever behavior caused the sanction to be implemented in the first place.
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hutzlibu 1116 days ago
No one claimed that sanctions alone will stop the war.

And ALL of the russians are under sanctions since 2014 btw. and that clearly did not prevented the big war, or made Putin less powerful. So if anything, this refutes that sanctions against a whole population are helping.

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fnovd 1116 days ago
No, it doesn't, because you don't know what the world would have looked like if there were no sanctions. If the impact of the sanctions delayed the war or forced Russia to go in with fewer supplies then the sanctions absolutely had a measurable impact. Just because Putin has strong authority now doesn't mean he wouldn't have been stronger without sanctions. Your arguments have no basis in reality.
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hutzlibu 1116 days ago
"If the impact of the sanctions delayed the war or forced Russia to go in with fewer supplies then the sanctions absolutely had a measurable impact."

If is key here. You claim there is no alternative to broad sanctions, yet they have been shown to not work (preventing war). And that they delayed the war, you show no proof or indications. If Putins plan was all out war from the beginning, then why would he have waited at all? And sanctions targeting special military supplies are a different thing from sanctioning the civilian population.

So what exactly is your argument based in reality?

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