US sanctions worsen the already bad economic situation but to claim the problem is caused by US sanctions is extremely misleading. We were already seeing severe shortages way before the 2014 sanctions (which were placed on individuals, anyway). The reasons are too complex to put in a short snippet.

Crimea and Venezuela are hard to compare. While there's the common point of having an authoritarian government, they're different in many other factors such as public support of the government, geography, pre-existing economy and timing and severity of the sanctions.

Though this is very true for both, I think:

> What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.

and from the POV of the authoritarian government on the sanctioned country it makes sense to double down upon receiving sanctions because the sanctioning country(ies) don't have a bigger stick than that (unless they resort to military aggression).