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Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

What if the regime doesn't change though? I hate to say it but if China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and every western tech company started banning Chinese users, 99% of them wouldn't even notice. By rushing to deplatform an entire nationality without nuance we're accelerating the decline of western tech hegemony and won't have any more cards to play if things get worse. A more sensible approach would be sanctions on elites while maintaining pipelines of information to Russians. If Russians get cut off from the world they will become more like North Koreans.

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There's certainly a possibility that change will not happen, but this is the best chance we have without escalating it to a world war.

Sanctions on elites have not caused regime change in other authoritarian regimes, we have even less reason to believe that it would happen with this one.

Russian people need to see that they are at a crossroads, and if they don't act in this narrow time window by organizing and protesting by the millions, they may indeed end up like North Korea.

It's really interesting that you point out that "sanctions on elites" have not worked, but seem to assume that general sanctions have. Do you have any example where they have worked? We've got plenty of examples where they haven't.

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Thank you: this is the sole example that I've seen where there is, at least, a correlation. Does not convince me that it's a generally applicable tool.

Still didn't end up in an overthrow of the regime, but rather regime recognizing that writing is on the wall, but definitely could be a case in point.

The West's threat against China is that they would stop importing their goods. A coordinated action like what we're seeing against Russia would completely crash China's export-driven economy. I doubt the CPC could weather that (or at least, I doubt the current leaders of the CPC could weather that).

I agree we shouldn't try to cut off the Russian internet, they need access to non-government-sanctioned information. But the economic sanctions need to apply to everyone in the country - if nothing else, it reduces Putin's ability to wage (expensive) wars. It sucks.

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