However, these sanctions are being enacted to stop more PEOPLE from being killed. Dead businesses are unfortunate, but acceptable collateral damage compared to human life.
1 - People who hates Putin regime still hates them, maybe a bit more, not much to gain here;
2 - People who likes Putin will hate you, again not much to lose here;
3 - People in the middle might hate Putin, but will definitely hate you more because you DIRECTLY hit them;
4 - Sending javelins/stingers to Ukraine will NOT stop Russian troops, but only to inflict more damage to them and at the same time make siege much more bloodier. It will just prolong the conflict with net lose on ordinary Ukraine citizen's side. Ukraine is still going to lose (and at the same time lost more human lives) anyway. The fantasy of "ordinary citizen taking urban guerilla warfare and driving enemies out" only works in games, unfortunately.
5 - If western countries REALLY want to minimize the damage to ordinary citizens, there are two feasible ways, one is to send in peace keeping troops including Air force and play a strong face to Putin. To avoid conflict with advancing Russian army a no-fly zone can be setup in Western Ukraine to accept refugees. The second way is to push the Ukraine army to let ordinary people to flee, not to keep them in the city.
I realize that this is cold comfort as the business you've put so much work into has now died for reasons outside of your control, and that's a really shitty situation to find yourself in. This is a black swan event. Your business acumen is not in doubt. You have no fault in this.
We can hope that this is the case, but we certainly don't know. We don't have knowledge of the future or alternative timelines. It is entirely possible that they are making the situation worse, the conflict more intense, or could lead to future Wars or nuclear annihilation.
This is the gamble that we are taking, perhaps a calculated gamble but a gamble nonetheless.
Anyone who says that they know for a fact what will happen is a liar
So we take a pragmatic approach based on our best information at the time, and as quickly as possible. How do you stop a dictator with the world's largest arsenal of nukes from engaging in a 19th century style land grab without destroying the world political order, world economies, and perhaps even the world itself? Now how do you do it without creating a power vacuum?
It's easy to stand back observing the results and criticize in hindsight (and believe me, we'll get plenty of that in a few months), but right now people need to make quick and possibly inefficient decisions using whatever information they can gather because the consequences are so grave.
But such argumentation is fruitless.
In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway, whilst the most well connected work around them anyway. See how North Korea has Apple computers ... for the leadership.
Sanctions aren't supposed to cause violent revolution, particularly.
They are supposed to:
(1) Pressure the regime to change the course of action which caused them, and
(2) Reduce the economic capacity behind, and this the effectiveness of, the targeted action so long as #1 doesn't work.
Promoting violent overthrow of the regime is a manner of achieving #1, but while it is often an acceptable outcome from sanctions, it's generally not the preferred outcome.
> They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway
All, even the most autocratic, regimes rely entirely on the at least tacit cooperation of “the little guy” to function at all.
It's this part that seems not very well supported. From what I can tell, Russia thought about the probable sanctions quite a lot before starting this course of action, so it's not clear to me that sanctions are going to have much effect. Even if sanctions generally were accomplishing something, it's not clear to me that these particular sanctions are doing anything useful.
It kind of seems like more Great Reset stuff, i.e., claim that something useful is being done while being incredibly disruptive in ways that destroy small businesses.
However, as others have pointed-out, this isn't about YOU - this is about a nation-state unilaterally deciding that it should attempt to DESTROY a neighbor for the sake of a few natural resources and a slightly larger buffer between it and other [what its leader thinks are] "enemy"/"hostile" nations
When did this become about America? /s
I find it funny, as a Muslim, to see how little discussion there is on this issue. As opposed to the middle east, where even drone strikes killing civilians are justified and made to seem like a very complicated issue with no simple solution. Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others it seems
Maybe the business is dead, maybe they will lose their home, and maybe their life's work. This will certainly happen to countless people.
The point of Broad and durable sanctions is often too simply hurt the lives of citizens and pressure or weaken the government.
When I worked in manufacturing environments, especially defense related ones, we had policies in place to ensure the reliability of our supply chain, but we didn't have anything in place to verify the reliability of our clients (other than credit, obviously). For example, we would verify the country of origin for purchased materials, but we never tracked where the final products wound up.
It is an interesting problem for sure. At least you can be flattered knowing that your work is being used as incentive; a weapon... and that it's working.
More so if you're trading with a rogue nation led by a criminal.
Sad news, but in perspective this will always happen. It's one reason why businesses have so much interest in what their government is doing.
Also, don't invest in non-democracies. You took a big gamble.