If you are a Belorusian elite with kids in US and UK schools, money in Switzerland etc, living comfortably so long as Lukashenko is president. Then suddenly your assets are frozen, and your children can't travel to London when their next semester in the very expensive school starts. All because Lukashenko had to discipline some kid. You aren't going to be happy about that little stunt, and Lukashenko will be told.
However, it can’t stop there. In this case, unfortunately, it has to get worse before it gets better for the average citizen in Belarus.
If the west is serious about taking down foreign dictators it needs to man up and start assassinating them, either with hit squads or drone strikes. No pussyfooting around and hiding behind the hope that locals will get the blood on their hands so the foreign bureaucrats don't have to. And if the EU isn't willing to do that, then it should be trying to do what it can to make life better for the Belarusians, just like a doctor would try to help a sick patient even if they spent a lifetime smoking and thus in some way might have some culpability for it.
And someone who beat and raped peaceful protesters just a month ago may walk by you in Venice beach, holding ice cream in one hand and leading his daughter with the other. And maybe he even has an older son or daughter who goes to UCLA or Stanford on the money he's pillaged. That's really common.
Current sanctions target only the very top, but violent regimes have layers and layers of collaborators and their family members who come to the west to enjoy freedoms they deprive others of in their country. This should have much more focus. Let them be confined to the environment they create.