Whoever is responsible/culpable doesn't matter. Sanctions aren't about punishing the population, they're about inciting a change.
A happy population doesn't riot and revolt. You need a miserable population to get something like that to happen.
A happy population doesn't riot and revolt. You need a miserable population to get something like that to happen.
Throughout history, revolutions only succeeded when there were enough privileged people on "their" side (eg. those with money, status...). I am not sure where the idea that sanctions work to this effect came from, but I have yet to see it: miserable population is scrambling to survive, not to fight ideological battles.
As an example, Serbia, where I am from, has been under heavy sanctions in early 90s: you'd be buying car fuel in 1.5l bottles smuggled from neighbouring countries, inflation was so bad that the day after paycheck, I'd be getting half of my parents salary for pocket money... Economy started recovering in late 90s after sanctions were abolished, and regime change happened in year 2000.
Counterpoint: what about the French revolution?
You are absolutely right that it's easier to have revolts led by the privileged - the American revolution was one. I'm sure there were plenty of others.
As for sanctions causing regime change, you may be right. But that's also not the goal here - the goal is to tank Russia's war effort and generally cause pain for him and his cronies. Of course plenty of people are probably hoping regime change will result but I doubt it'll be a direct consequence, if it happens at all.
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/french-revolution-leaders seems to disagree: most, if not all, of them come from privileged backgrounds.
Broad based sanctions assume, completely wrong, that Putin’s (or any dictator’s) power comes from the common Russian people. Wrong! And that’s why sanctions will only hurt the common Russians and keep Putin and his cronies in power for decades. In reality, he draws his power, like all other dictators, from an inner circle. These would be the oligarchs, heads of military and police and some others. This is where the sanctions should be targeted if the intention is to effectively change the regime. Hurting the population does not mean the pain will trickle up to the inner circle.
Autoritarian regimes with a lot of money can do more damage than those with few. As witnessed this week.
Throughout the history, trade happened with partners. Western world made it seem like taking it away is a sanction instead of having it as a "gift to improve each others country".
This could be reversing because of Russia now.
Yes, the Soviet Union.
So much so, that there wasn't much trade to sanction.
We have integrated economies now, there's a lot to directly sanction, we didn't back then.
Where was IKEA, Toyota, Nike, Apple, Intel etc. and their 1970's peers doing in Russia?
They were not. There just wasn't brand commercial integration. Same thing for information, services, travel, finance etc..
We'd have to shut down most of our trade now to reach the level of de-facto 'sanction' of the Soviet Union.
Here's a topical example: Russia threatened Ukraine with sanctions if Ukraine signed a free trade deal with the EU [1] [2]. It effectively stalled free trade talks between Ukraine and the EU.
That happened in late 2013. In a twist of irony, this enraged ordinary Ukrainians and kicked off the Euromaidan protests that forcibly deposed Ukraine's president at the time - Viktor Yanukovych - and toppled his regime. This led to the annexation of Crimea and, well, the rest is history.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-eu-russia/russia-ste...