Hacker News Reader

Comment by option | Hacker News Reader

sanctions like these only alienate (otherwise mostly pro-democracy) people from US/West.

Do impose sanctions on individuals who are associated with the rules of undemocratic regimes. But punishing whole populations (especially if they don’t have a democratic voice in the matter) is dumb and immoral.

View on HN

What's the alternative?

Keeping the status quo and pretending like nothing significant happened when some country decides to annex another country's soil in 21th century?

In that case loosing moral ground would alienate people from US/West even more.

Well not sanction the country that got annexed for starters. If you are going to annex a whole country, which I am not advocating, then sanction Russia

This. The ruling class in the countries can still get the products and services they want. Can someone actually point to a case where broad sanctions like this has made a difference? Cuba has survived these sanctions for decades. When politians like Marco Rubio says the regime is about to break if we keep the pressure on, I just laugh.

the UK is especially disgusting in this. For example, Chelsea is still owned by Abramovich (a close Putin’s ally) who has no trouble traveling, buying property and otherwise enjoying what West has to offer. Tons of “Untied Russia” party members own property in Miami and London with no issues whatsoever

It’s hard to prove causation, but South Africa only started making real progress towards ending apartheid after broad sanctions started getting passed.

It's the time of China, I doubt this would work anymore.

I agree. Back during the cold war we used to run radio stations broadcasting into enemy territory to create sympathy and show that we are humans too. Today we seem to be doing the opposite.

Especially when they democratically voted in favour of being part of Russia. This is essentially a punishment for them for voting the way they did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com