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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> individuals who happen to live in Russia?

I am highly sympathetic to the plight of civilians under Putin. Good people in a bad place.

But come on. Crimea was annexed almost a decade ago. The troop build-up was broadcast for months. For several days, international airlines were flying. Unlike in Ukraine, nobody is subjecting Russia’s people to mortal peril. But there is a bare minimum level of culpability that comes with nationality. Being told, with advance notice, that you need to move your domains amply clears that threshold.

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Our Russian contractor has been attempting to emigrate for most of his life, and he has a leg up on the rest of the people in the country because he lives in a border town and his family is historically from Poland. That he has not succeeded should maybe tell us something about how easy this sort of thing is.

Also, if you are a U.S. citizen and you would not like to support the droning of weddings and the indefinite detention and torture of taxicab drivers at Guantanamo Bay, you need to pay $150,000 or so to Saint Kitts or some similar country to buy a citizenship so that you can end your relationship with the IRS.

> culpability that comes with nationality

I thought we were over this 80 years ago

> I thought we were over this 80 years ago

We don't hold ordinary citizens accountable for the crimes of their country. Putin invading Ukraine doesn't justify dropping bombs on Russian homes.

But culpability? For resident nationals? Unless you were a dissident or in the opposition, yes, you absolutely bear culpability. I wouldn't even go so far as to say in a moral sense. Not automatically. But at least to one's ability to interact with other countries' economies.

> But culpability? For resident nationals? Unless you were a dissident or in the opposition, yes, you absolutely bear culpability. I wouldn't even go so far as to say in a moral sense. Not automatically. But at least to one's ability to interact with other countries' economies.

Maybe you are right. But holding ordinary citizens accountable doesn't always work the way we want. That's exactly what the West did with Germans after World War 1.

It depends on what you mean by "holding accountable"

Germany was financially crippled and mostly demilitarized after WW1 which of course hugely affected the population. But in terms of _actually_ holding people personally accountable, there was a much stronger and organized effort after WW2, see e.g. [0]. I think that worked out rather okay. So I don't think it's quite as simple as saying it doesn't work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

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