We need to isolate Russia using non-violence. Primarily, refusing to buy their oil and gas.
Remote bricking all iOS devices in Russia would be an offensive escalation because it would directly harm Russian assets.
Barring Russia from SWIFT… does that amount to a refusal to trade with them? That feels appropriately non-violent, but I’m unsure exactly what it would involve.
I believe you’re wrong to think the escalation is inherently a mistake, or never a path out of conflict. It is common wisdom to observe that bullies may only be stopped with escalatory tactics.
So it seems to me that the West must find some way to show a spine and push back, short of open war. The alternative cedes European hegemony, and the fate of those democracies, to Moscow’s cold hands.
It's still nonviolent.
This...never existed in a military/geopolitical context? Does Ukraine get to sue Russia for materiel it's blowing up?
Of course. Same with SWIFT cut-off.
Doing it in a way that is not arbitrary would be key. (I don't know how one would do that. There is no precedent for that type of action, and it is not being seriously considered by senior policymakers.)
It would be more deaths in 24h than the entire Ukraine invasion so far.
You can pretend such would be nonviolent, but it's basically a terror attack on civillian medical infrastructure.
There are humans, existing in a complex society. All meaning is negotiated all the time. All the expectations of behaviour from which your confidant hueristic analysis springs are at all times liable to be contradicted. For instance, few would have thought that the "powers that be" would permit massive conventional war in Europe at this late date.
There is no platonic, eternal, divine legal system in which we encode what is and isn't actually war or which escalations are permissible in discrete scenarios.
This would also be helping the Russian government prevent the spread of information outside of their own sources, regarding the conflict.