Every person can. That's why sanctions exist: to incentivize a government to focus on its people and isolate a violent government from the world, or conversely, for a people to hold their government accountable.
What would you propose the world do instead of sanctions when diplomacy alone has clearly failed?
Do you think it is easy to stay against government with army? Look at Ukraine, there's the same Russian army there.
If the West actually wants to defend Ukraine, it needs to intervene militarily. If it doesn't, then it shouldn't try to placate its conscience with meaningless token gestures.
Governments have changed behavior after sanctions regimes were put in place. The degree and mechanisms of any causal relationship are infinitely debatable, because it's near impossible to falsify them conclusively.
> If the West actually wants to defend Ukraine, it needs to intervene militarily. If it doesn't, then it shouldn't try to placate its conscience with meaningless token gestures.
The government of Ukraine, who is both better positioned to evaluate the value of interventions and whose leaders have quite a bit personally at stake, doesn't seem to have this attitude of “intervene militarily or fuck off”, and has indeed been calling for sanctions and specific enhancements to them.
Besides, Russia knew of all the possible sanctions way in advance, and proceeded to invade anyway - which already tells you how much the government there is worried about them in practice.
Biden is absolutely correct: sanctions couldn't and won't prevent anything. What he's not saying, but what follows directly, is that military force is the only option that'll work.
The American foreign policy instinct is always for unrelenting brutality.
There's nuance that you're missing (e.g UN not empowered to sanction war crimes by a veto-power state), and your broad interpretation doesn't align with accepted practice.
A relevant analysis: https://www.epw.in/engage/article/do-sanctions-violate-inter...
The UN has had a structure for dealing with veto-power obstructionism since 1950.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assem...